Machine Intelligence and the Ethical Grammar of Computability

Since the publication of Alan Turing’s famous papers on “machine intelligence” over six decades ago, questions about whether complex mechanical systems can partake in intelligent cognitive processes have largely been answered under the analytical rubric of their capacity successfully to simulate symbol-mongering human behavior. While this focus on the mimetic potential of computers in response to the question “Can machines think?” has come to be accepted as one of the great bequests of Turing’s reflections on the nature of artificial intelligence, I argue in this paper that a closer look at Turing’s oeuvre reveals an especially informative tension between the pragmatic and normative insights, which enabled him in 1936 to formulate his pioneering version of the theory of mechanical computability, and his later attempt to argue for a simplistic notion of “machine intelligence” as an effectual imitation of the human mind. In fleshing out the source of this tension, I endeavor to show how the mimetic model of “thinking machines” that Turing eventually embraces is ultimately at cross-purposes with the normative-pragmatic insights by which he reached his original innovations in computability theory and combinatorial logic.