At the Dawn of AI

Reflections on the Turing Test

Abstract

Over seventy years after its publication, Alan Turing’s article Computing Machinery and Intelligence still fuels debate on the meaning and structure of the test it introduces, the limits of answering “Can machines think?”, and the validity of that question itself. Widely seen as the first visionary manifesto on artificial intelligence, the article anticipated many ideas that became foundational in AI research. At a time when computers were mainly tools for high-speed calculation – first in military contexts and then in science – Turing used the concept of a computational machine to pose philosophical questions about human intelligence, the link between computation and thought, and the possibility of algorithmically modeling cognition. This essay reconstructs the test’s structure and assumptions (§§ 1-3), explores the link between Turing’s and Leibniz’s views on thinking machines (§ 4), and examines major criticisms of the mental model in Turing’s work (§ 5).