Turing and the Tyranny of Numbers

Today sees the centenary of the birth of one of the truly great figures of the 20th century, a man who, it could be argued, profoundly changed the course of human history not once, but twice. Yet, because of both the nature of his work and the workings of his nature, he was nearly forgotten for several decades. Even as people are beginning to appreciate his legacy, the British government is resisting calls to have him pardoned for the supposedly shameful crime that led to him taking his own life just two weeks before his 42nd birthday. Alan Mathison Turing, best known for his work during the Second World War at the government intelligence base at Bletchley Park, was instrumental in helping crack the German Enigma code. His most important contribution was to design and oversee construction of a machine which could automatically search through the billions of possible cypher combinations that Enigma could generate, reducing the time taken to decipher messages from months down to hours. His work may have shortened the war by up to two years, and in doing so saved countless lives.

Even so, it is his later contributions that I believe are of greater interest to those interested in where the Occupy movement might go.

Turing was brought to Bletchley Park because of his abilities as a mathematician. He showed a remarkable aptitude for the subject from an early age – as well as an extraordinary determination. His first day at secondary school coincided with the beginning of the General Strike of 1926, yet, undeterred, he cycled the 60 miles to school, stopping overnight in an inn to make sure that he was on time. Yet his time at school was marred by tragedy. Turing had a crush on an older boy who died of bovine tuberculosis, and this in many ways shattered Turing’s Catholic worldview. From that moment he became an ardent atheist materialist, believing that the workings of the human brain were biomechanical and biochemical processes.

This was a radical enough view to take at the time, but Turing pushed the implications further with his groundbreaking work on the theory of computing. In a staggeringly original piece of work, he showed that a very basic machine, one that could just read and write 1’s and 0’s along a movable tape, could, in principle, do anything that was calculable. The extension of this discovery, which became called the ‘Universal Turing Machine’, made it theoretically possible to build a machine that could be programmed not simply to perform one function, but any function at all.

In our iPhone world this may seem like nothing special, but consider the world in which Turing was working. Here, a ‘computer’ was not the name given to a calculating machine, but to the operator (usually a woman) of that machine. And the machines that were being used were built – like the one to go through the Enigma variations – to do just one task. It was a pre-digital, mechanical world, where a hole-punch did just one thing: punch holes.

Consider approaching an inventor and asking them to come up with a machine that can do all that your laptop can do. You want a single machine to be able to send and receive messages, play videos, type documents, look up information, show you what time your train is, how to get to the station, and even whether the train is going to be on time. For the pre-digital inventor, this list of specifications would seem impossible. It might be possible to build a machine to achieve one of these functions – but to be able integrate them into one machine would seem…miraculous.

Turing’s theoretical work proposed that such a machine could be made, and thus he laid the foundations for modern computing. Yet philosophers quickly realised that there were important ontological questions here too. For the hole punch, its essence can be said to precede its existence: it is designed and made with only one specific purpose in mind. What was radically new about the machines that came from Turing’s work were that their existence preceded their essence: they were built with a purpose which would evolve in use.

Some saw this as a significant moment in human history, as they believed the only other things in the universe where existence preceded essence, were human beings themselves. As the writer Brian Christian puts it in ‘The Most Human Human,’

“We arrive in a bright room, wet, bloody, bewildered, some stranger smacking us and cutting what had been, up to that point, our only source of oxygen and food. We have no idea what’s going on. We don’t know what we’re supposed to do, where we’re supposed to go, who we are, or what in the world, after all this trauma, comes next. So we cry… because existence without essence is stressful. These are not problems that a hole-punch can understand.”

Turing’s work had diminished the differences between human beings and machines, and he had done so from a position of hard materialism born of the tragedy that had struck him at school. He predicted that in fewer than 50 years it would be possible for a machine to converse through the exchange of text-based messages, and that the human would not know that they were talking to a machine at all. This became known as the ‘Turing Test’, and Turing provoked further debate by claiming that if a machine could pass this test, it would have to be classed as ‘intelligent’.

Shocking as this at first was, the world not only accepted that machines were destined to become more intelligent, but that we, as human beings, were more machine-like than we might have thought. It is here, as humanity embraced our new status as complex machines, that we get to the impact of Turing’s work on the world of ideologies, for if human beings were machines, then they could be disposed of and replaced just as machines were. A machine felt no alienation from its labour, so why should we worry when we laid people off? The mechanisation, and then digitisation, of work contributed to a dehumanisation of labour: only the markets mattered, not people.

Yet there is a further implication of Turing’s work, from the other direction. Not only are people treated like machines, but machines are now treated more like people. As a recent BBC piece explained, part of the reason for the economic crisis has been an over-reliance on computer simulations and complex mathematical algorithms like the Black-Scholes Formula. The economic decisions that these equations recommend have been taken as gospel. The wisdom of human experience and intelligence has been ignored because the computer, so quick and so powerful, must be right.

From our insistence that the SatNav must know better, despite the fact that we are driving through a river, to the blind confidence bankers had in computers even as their calculations drove us into the ocean, the dark side of Turing’s legacy has been the acceptance of the belief that computers can have something approaching intelligence. Their speed and computational power have bedazzled us into accepting every turn they suggest.

The final tragedy of Alan Turing’s life was that this mechanistic view of human intelligence ended up being used against him. Prosecuted for his homosexuality, experts considered the ‘flaw’ in his biology could be corrected by chemical castration, like a machine being serviced. Increasingly depressed, Turing injected an apple with cyanide and took his own life on 7th June 1954. He was 41 years old.

As we celebrate the centenary of this truly great man’s birth, what can we glean from his life as we look to move the Occupy movement forward? It is clear that the struggles we face are on many fronts, but one of the most important is on the intellectual and intra-personal level.

What Turing’s own life teaches us is that we must resist the denigration of human beings to little more than disposable components of labour markets. But, equally, we must resist the elevation of the machines we use to pedestals where our own long experience and wisdom becomes ignored. Equations and computers are wonderful tools, but they must remain as such: tools which we choose to control, and choose to put down. To treat them otherwise is to not only risk further economic instability, but a profound lack of empathy which leads, as it did for Turing himself, to destruction.

Kester Brewin‘s new book, Mutiny! Why We Love Pirates and How They Can Save Us is out now. See kesterbrewin.com/pirates