Alan Turing and the Machines That Imitate Us

He cracked the Nazi Enigma code—and may have shortened World War II by two years. He helped invent the modern computer—before the term even existed. He asked a question no one had dared to ask: “Can machines think?” And then set out to answer it.His name was Alan Turing. A Cambridge mathematician turned wartime cryptanalyst, Turing worked in secret at Bletchley Park, leading the effort to break Germany’s unbreakable code. After WWII he turned his mind to the next frontier: intelligent machines and proposed the Imitation Game—what we now call the Turing Test—as a way to measure whether a machine could convincingly mimic human conversation.We brought Alan Turing to 2025 to ask what he thinks of his legacy. We may not be happy with his response.More information: They Tried to Warn Us, the book: More info on each podcast interview subject, along with 15 more interviews.They Tried to Warn Us, the newsletter: Follow the action on Ray's Substack.