{"id":662,"date":"2012-06-27T00:58:00","date_gmt":"2012-06-27T00:58:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/2012\/06\/27\/bruce-sterling-on-alan-turing-gender-ai-and-art-criticism\/"},"modified":"2012-06-27T00:58:00","modified_gmt":"2012-06-27T00:58:00","slug":"bruce-sterling-on-alan-turing-gender-ai-and-art-criticism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/2012\/06\/27\/bruce-sterling-on-alan-turing-gender-ai-and-art-criticism\/","title":{"rendered":"Bruce Sterling on Alan Turing, gender, AI, and art criticism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bruce Sterling on Alan Turing, gender, AI, and art criticism<\/a>:
Bruce Sterling gave a speech at the North American Summer School in Logic, Language, and Information (NASSLLI) on the eve of the Alan Turing Centenary, and delivered a provocative, witty and important talk on the Turing Test, gender and machine intelligence, Turing’s life and death, and art criticism. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n
If you study his biography, the emotional vacuum in the guy\u2019s life was quite frightening. His parents are absent on another continent, he\u2019s in boarding schools, in academia, in the intelligence services, in the closet of the mid-20th-century gay life. Although Turing was a bright, physically strong guy capable of tremendous hard work, he never got much credit for his efforts during his lifetime.<\/p>\n

How strange was Alan Turing? Was Alan Turing a weird, scary guy? Let\u2019s try a thought experiment, because I\u2019m a science fiction writer and we\u2019re into those counterfactual approaches.<\/p>\n

So let\u2019s just suppose that Alan Turing is just the same personally: he\u2019s a mathematician, an early computer scientist, a metaphysician, a war hero \u2014 but he\u2019s German. He\u2019s not British. Instead of being the Bletchley Park code breaker, he\u2019s the German code maker. He\u2019s Alan Turingstein, and he realizes the Enigma Machine has a flaw. So, he imagines, designs and builds a digital communication code system for the Nazis. He defeats the British code breakers. In fact, he\u2019s so brilliant that he breaks some of the British codes instead. Therefore, the second World War lasts until the Americans drop their nuclear bomb on Europe.<\/p>\n

I think you\u2019ll agree this counter-history is plausible, because so many of Turing\u2019s science problems were German \u2014 the famous \u201cending problem\u201d of computability was German. The Goedel incompleteness theorem was German, or at least Austrian. The world\u2019s first functional Turing-complete computer, the Konrad Zuse Z3, was operational in May 1941 and was supported by the Nazi government.<\/p>\n

So then imagine Alan Turingstein, mathematics genius, computer pioneer, and Nazi code expert. After the war, he messes around in the German electronics industry in some inconclusive way, and then he commits suicide in some obscure morals scandal. What would we think of Alan Turingstein today, on his centenary? I doubt we\u2019d be celebrating him, and secretly telling ourselves that we\u2019re just like him.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Turing Centenary Speech (New Aesthetic)Turing Centenary Speech (New Aesthetic)<\/a><\/p>\n

(Image: Tsar Bomba mushroom cloud<\/a>, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0)<\/a> image from andyz’s photostream<\/i>)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
\"\"\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bruce Sterling on Alan Turing, gender, AI, and art criticism: Bruce Sterling gave a speech at the North American Summer School in Logic, Language, and Information (NASSLLI) on the eve of the Alan Turing Centenary, and delivered a provocative, witty and important talk on the Turing Test, gender and machine intelligence, Turing’s life and death, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-662","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3pfIY-aG","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/662","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=662"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/662\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=662"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=662"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=662"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}