Telepathy Proof Room – Alan Turing’s Human Machines

In this episode, I return to Alan Turing’s 1950 essay in Mind "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" –  a foundational text in the history of artificial intelligence, but also one that is far stranger, more playful, and more haunting than we might anticipates. This is the essay where Turing famously asks, "Can machines think?" But rather than define thinking, he proposes a game  - the Imitation Game[The Turing Test] - a conversational test designed not to reveal intelligence as an inner property, but as something enacted, judged, and performed in dialogue. We explore how this seemingly simple setup unsettles traditional metaphysical assumptions about the mind. On my re-reading I didn’t find a cold piece of determinism, it contains moments of humour, wonder, and a surprising detour into telepathy - a bizarre and often forgotten detail. What emerges is a vision of intelligence not as a static essence, but as a kind of performance -something that must be continually enacted and recognised by others.

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