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 This morning by chance, I picked for my subway reading the copy of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's article on "The Church-Turing Thesis" I had printed months ago. It was only later in the day that ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} rachiestar pointed out to me that today is Alan Turing's birthday. Because I owe the man quite a bit--not the most nor least my livelihood--I thought it would be appropriate to write something to honor the man.( For the philosophers... ) Turing defended a thesis along the lines of "Every effectively computable process can be performed by a Turing machine." But in Turing's day a "computer" was a human being engaged in a rule-governed but otherwise mindless clerical task. The notion of "effectively computable" is explicitly defined in terms of what a person could accomplish with exact instructions, pencil and paper, finite time and no insight, ingenuity, or creativity whatsoever. In other words, it was defined in terms of a particular kind of materially necessary "mental" labor to which thousands if not millions of people were enslaved. ( some supporting quotations ) We should hail Turing as a liberator. For with the invention of the digital computer he made obsolete an entire genus of life-negating and alienating labor. The assembly line is to the dehumanization of physical existence as the clerical desk is to the dehumanization of mental existence. In the place of the clerical class, Turing established the hacker class, a class with more freedom and more potential for praxis than any than that have stood before it. One commonly hears the worry, if not the lament, that technology is encroaching too far into the domain of life and the mind. Without making any claims about the extent of the technological infrastructure, it can be safely said of Turing's technology--the technology of computing--that the domains into which it encroaches are virtually by definition not worth of our life and our minds. Every new task conquered by computation is one that has burdened us and prevented us from engaging in lives of freedom, passion, and genius. So thank you, Alan Turing. We owe you so much. Happy birthday. | ||||||||
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