Not anymore, mostly because he’s dead. I haven’t played the various games he wrote (aside from a little bit of the Hitchhiker’s Guide text adventure), but I understand the Starship Titanic game he was involved with had some kind of natural language conversation thing. Is this accurate? And, was Adams involved in designing or programming that part?

The essay’s taking on some interesting territory, but it’s really only interesting because Sterling said it, much as he claims about Eno (some work is only appreciated/valid as art because of who did it). A more interesting essay might touch on prior work in this area, like Kant’s Critique of Judgement or Benjamin’s “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” or, to get some point happening in the gender area, Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto.”

There’s also a lot of work being done on computer generated poetry/literature that addresses Sterling’s issues. That issue has, in fact, been beaten to death in some rather tedious ways that have yet to move beyond the claims and discussions being made between WW1 and WW2.

Then thinking about how a Republican led Congress rejected (surprise surprise) Wilson’s entry plan for the League Of Nations, I guess the real bad guys in WWII were the politicians from all sides.  So what else is new, right?

But definitely chalk one up for the USA with the bipartisan Marshall Plan, a spectacularly wise move.

Or we’d be dead of course.

that may not fit the mythology of the genius sacrificed to a bigoted society.

I’m going to stick with the genius/sacrificed/bigoted narrative unless somebody also discovers that he was never arrested or forcibly chemically neutered.

Maybe those 16000 computers learned to identify pictures of cats not by accident but rather because they were trying to make their dull life more interesting :P

‘”Whilst in custody with the other criminals, I had a very agreeable sense of irresponsibility, rather like being back at school.” What is more, Turing had tolerated the year-long hormone treatment and the terms of his probation (“my shining virtue was terrific”) with amused fortitude.’

Many friends and acquaintances testified to his cheerful frame of mind. Whatever the cause of his death, his ending was a tragedy simply because of his greatness, but if it wasn’t due to suicide and was the result of his home experiments using cyanide then that may not fit the mythology of the genius sacrificed to a bigoted society.

Whatever the truth, we’ve all benefited from his genius.

… happening to have been born in a country that was on the right side of WWII

You mean winning side, right? History, written, y’know.

Remember that the UK government either didn’t find out about Turning until 1952 or, at the very least, looked the other way until then.  I think it is reasonable to assume that the allies would have know less about an Alan Turinstein’s background in 1945 than they did the real Alan Turing.

Operation Paperclip also actively falsified the backgrounds of many of its recruits so they could get security clearances.  While it is possible they might have rejected an Alan Turingstein out of hand, it seems well within the bounds of reasonable speculation to consider the alternative where he would have been recruited.

By the way,  cool pseudonym

Now, Turing had the good luck not to be born German, but he also had the bad luck of being a consistently eccentric, shadowy, obscure, cooped-up and closeted guy. Furthermore, I believe our world has many such people right now — few so brilliant as him, but many as isolated as him. Rather than apologizing to Alan Turing after his death, I’d be happier if we had some working way to reach out to other Alan Turings, ways to find people like him and to convince them to put down the poisoned apple and find good, sensible reasons to cheer the hell up and enjoy life.

“However, that’s by no means what Turing actually says in his original paper on the subject. The real Turing imitation game is not about that process at all. It’s about an entirely different process of gender politics and transvestism. It’s about a machine imitating a woman.”

Sterling concludes, “If you go check out the many efforts at Turing Tests in the years since, you don’t see many machines strenuously pretending to be girls — Alan is sailing that queer sea of thought pretty much alone.” But I think Sterling is being way too literal here. If you read the original paper, Turing first presents a scenario where you have two people “a man (A), a woman (B)”, both trying to convince an interrogator (C) that they are woman. It seems to me that this example is just brought up to illustrate the idea of someone trying to convince an interrogator that they are something they are not, in a conventional scenario involving two humans (and gender is one of the more obvious ways in which humans can differ). Turing then says:

We now ask the question, “What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game?” Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman?

I feel fairly certain that Turing was merely making an analogy to the original imitation game, in effect saying “what if the same sort of game was played, except in this case instead of A being a man falsely pretending to be a woman, A is a machine falsely pretending to be a human?” (aren’t we all familiar with the looseness of how analogical phrases like “now imagine the same thing, except…” are used in everyday speech?) I don’t think the intention was that it was meant to be exactly the same game, including the fact that the machine was trying to convince the interrogator it was a woman. Just look at the questions Turing imagines asking A, which have nothing to do with gender and instead have to do with tasks we conventionally imagine humans being better at than machines or vice versa, like writing sonnets and quickly figuring out winning chess moves. Likewise notice where Turing talks about covering the machine with realistic artificial skin, and says even supposing this invention available we should feel there was little point in trying to make a “thinking machine” more human by dressing it up in such artificial flesh–he says “more human” (indicating that the machine is trying to trick the interrogator into thinking it’s a human), not “more like a woman”. So, I think a major part of Sterling’s case for Turing’s “weirdness” is just based on poor reading comprehension.

Also, I question the whole premise that Turing was “closeted” and repressed, and that this had something to do with why his peers often regarded him as weird/eccentric or socially isolated (lots of scientific and mathematical geniuses have some degree of Asperger’s-like-traits, including much less desire for socializing than the average person–would Sterling consider Einstein to be sad and pathetic because he said “I am truly a ‘lone traveler’ and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude”?) From what I read he was actually quite open about his sexuality, and this was part of why he wasn’t careful about not giving himself away to the police when he called them to investigate a theft by a lover of his. For example, this Washington Post story says:

From early in his adolescence, Turing understood that he was gay and saw nothing wrong with it. If the society in which he lived criminalized homosexuality, he believed the fault lay with the society, not with the men and women it vilified. He made little effort to disguise or efface his desire for other men, and when, in the early 1950s, he embarked on a businesslike affair with a youth in Manchester, his sense of how the world should be clashed with how it was.

Sterling’s suggestion that we need “ways to find people like him and to convince them to put down the poisoned apple and find good, sensible reasons to cheer the hell up and enjoy life” also seems rather tone-deaf, assuming that his relative social isolation (and it was only relative, he certainly wasn’t friendless) and eccentricity were indications that his entire life was a basically unhappy one that needed curing (many people with Asperger’s-like personalities are perfectly happy with their low degree of socializing, there’s no need to stigmatize this), as opposed to the more obvious explanation that he became depressed after being forced to take hormone treatments by the government (a form of chemical castration which left him impotent, and may well have altered the chemistry of his brain in a way that induced depression).

(Edit: that was supposed to be in reply to Rhyolite. Sorry!)

I wish people would click through to read the whole thing, because it’s really actually very good in its entirety.

His genius would have been the same even if he never lifted a finger to stop the Nazis.