Would a pardon really be justice for Alan Turing?

I make no apologies for transcribing this article from the kindle version of the New Scientist (27/07/13). I’ll put my thoughts at the end, as this is rather a thought provoking article.
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The legendary computer scientist and codebreaker may finally get a posthumous pardon. It’s just dust and posturing, says a modern-day virtual reality pioneer.

What do we do with the knowledge that people not all that different from ourselves have behaved with astounding stupidity and cruelty over and over again, in the recent past? Become paranoid of ourselves?

This is the kind of question that haunts me when I think of Alan Turing. For those who don’t know, Turing was the most essential mathematician leading to the invention of computers and the birth of my discipline, computer science. I couldn’t owe him more. He was also one of the greatest war heroes we have known, for he applied computer science in its birthing hour to break Enigma, a notorious Nazi code, and is generally thought to have shortened the course of the war by perhaps two years. He might have saved millions of lives, even nations.

We’re not done. In the years before his death in 1954, Turning made a huge contribution to artificial intelligence, including what has come to be known as the famous “Turing Test” thought experiment. And yet he did that with a degree of sophistication – including a dose of salutary self-doubt – that derivative AI enthusiast rarely achieve.

Illegal state of being

If only this wonderful roster could suffice as a summary of a great life. Alas, we must also remember how Turing died. He was gay at a time when that was an illegal state of being. He was prosecuted after the war, and subjected to “chemical castration”. He apparently killed himself eating an apple laced with cyanide, at age 41. We will never know what further gifts he could have given.
Now, after decades of murmurs and false starts, it appears that the UK government will produce a posthumous pardon. How can we think about this?

It isn’t easy. Of course the prosecution of Turin was an abomination. But as present-day observers, are we stroking ourselves on the back a little readily by suggesting we now have the perspicuity from which to declare a pardon to this one brilliant man? What about the almost 50,000 other men in the UK convicted in the same way? Do you have to be one of the highest performing people of the century to merit a pardon under an immoral law that has been repudiated?

The very idea of a pardon suggests that the government speaks from a moral high ground and that the prosecution might have been inadvertently based on false evidence or some other bloodless mistake. There is a degree of implicit misrepresentation, though it is never easy for a government to own up to its own failings. (It took about a century and a half after the official end of slavery in the US for the government to finally state and apology, which was intoned by President Bill Clinton.)

Confused message

The notion of a pardon sends a confused message. Shouldn’t there be an apology to all those convicted, directed to their memory and their descendants? I am not a British citizen, but as a computer scientist, I think I have some small standing to voice a complaint.

I have always wanted to get more of a sense of Turing, the person. The historian George Dyson has done wonderful work bringing the earliest chapters of computer science to light; his books are a fine place to start. But I got a glimpse of the man earlier this year, when I was speaking in Victoria, Canada, about the gratitude all of us in computer science feel toward Turing.

Afterwards, an elderly woman named Olive Bailey was introduced to me. She was lovely, formal and yet quite emotional, for you see, she was one of the last remaining members of the codebreaking team that worked with Turing at Bletchley Park. (During the war years and for sometime thereafter, a window of opportunity opened for technically gifted women. This pattern wasn’t unique to Britain. In the US, when the brightest male techies were corralled into industrial-scale high-tech projects like nuclear weapons or long range missiles, women were often recruited to work in the still new field of software. Grace Hopper, for instance led a mostly female team to develop the first code compiler.)

Nerdy yet colourful

One thing that Olive told me was that Turing was not a person who revealed a great deal of himself in the lab, but he did set the tone for how to do computer science, and she feels that tone living on thought computer researchers today, even if it’s not clear how to articulate exactly what it entails. Turing was both a prototype of the “nerdy” personality we associate with digital technology today, and a romantic, daring, colourful soul.

In pure mathematics, it is commonly recognised that while the maths itself is abstract, the way we understand it is cultural, and therefore it is relevant to know the human stories behind mathematical advances. We benefit from knowing about Paul Eudös’s eccentric, rambling life for instance, because it informs our appreciation of his rambling accomplishments. Understanding a little about him helps us enter into his mindset and trace his steps.

But computer science has taken on a somewhat less humanistic sensibility. This is unfortunate. I have seen the Turing test taught many times, in philosophy or computer science departments, and the circumstances of Turing’s life at the time are rarely brought into the narrative.

The test, published in 1950, was Turing’s thought experiment in which he asks whether we would, so to speak, deny personhood to a computer that could fool us into thinking that it was a person in the course of a conversation. But Turing wrote of this idea during a troubled period of his life, just as he himself was being denied personhood. Furthermore, he was being persecuted by a government that he had helped triumph over fascism, the ideology most based on denying the humanity of others.

Pure Mind

Might Turing’s notion of the test have been an indictment if how we judge each other’s humanity? Might it have been a comforting fantasy, an escape into an abstract form of existence where no one is gay or straight, but only pure mind? Turing didn’t live long enough to say all he probably would have about his thinking. In a footnote he speculates that even if a computer became a “person” according to empirical criteria, both it and a natural human would still derive personhood from a source beyond physics, from the divine.

Whatever the test meant to Turing in his final days, I don’t detect hatred, vengeance or really any outward aggression in his voice. This is remarkable. I can hardly imagine being in similar circumstances without lashing out at my persecutors. This is Turing’s legacy, and any pardon coming so late in the game is nothing but dust and posturing in comparison.

This article originally appeared on Slate
Jaron Lanier is the author of Who Owns the Future? (Simon & Schuster 2013) and is a computer scientist, currently at Microsoft Research. He is best known for his work in virtual reality.

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I was wrong. I can’t comment on such a well written article, and it was only in the transcription process from my Kindle to the blog that I realised this. But it has made me realise one thing - Love is a human right – not a crime

Man grows pea plant inside lung

Now this wasn't what I was expectting when I started surfing the web, I will admit. But, as my default home page is the BBC News site, I just had to click on the story...


Karen

Now some things you hold on to - and some you just let go
Seems like the ones that you can't have
Are the ones that you want most

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A Massachusetts man who was rushed to hospital with a collapsed lung came home with an unusual diagnosis: a pea plant was growing in his lung.

Ron Sveden had been battling emphysema for months when his condition deteriorated.

He was steeling himself for a cancer diagnosis when X-rays revealed the growth in his lung.

Doctors believe that Mr Sveden ate the pea at some point, but it "went down the wrong way" and sprouted.

"One of the first meals I had in the hospital after the surgery had peas for the vegetable. I laughed to myself and ate them," Mr Sveden told a local Boston TV reporter.

Mr Sveden said the plant was about half an inch (1.25cm) in size.

"Whether this would have gone full-term and I'd be working for the Jolly Green Giant, I don't know. I think the thing that finally dawned on me is that it wasn't the cancer," Mr Sveden said.

He is currently recovering at home with his wife Nancy, who joked that God must have a sense of humour.

The Human Body!

This got sent to me by my other half, and made me laugh.

Karen

Now some things you hold on to - and some you just let go
Seems like the ones that you can't have
Are the ones that you want most

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It takes your food seven seconds to get from your mouth to your stomach.

One human hair can support 3kg (6.6 lb) .

Human thighbones are stronger than concrete.

A woman's heart beats faster than a man's.

There are about one trillion bacteria on each of your feet.

Women blink twice as often as men.

The average man's penis is three times the length of his thumb.

The average person's skin weighs twice as much as the brain.

Your body uses 300 muscles to balance itself when you are standing still.

If saliva cannot dissolve something, you cannot taste it.

Women reading this will be finished now.

Men are still busy checking their thumbs.

Something that reduced me to tears..

I'm not normally prone to tears in the office, but this finished me off, and as I read it, there were tears flowing down my cheeks. Take time to read it, and you'll see why:

Each year he sent her roses, and the note would always say, I love you even more this year, than last year on this day. My love for you will always grow, with every passing year."


She knew this was the last time that the roses would appear. She thought, he ordered roses in advance before this day. Her loving husband did not know, that he would pass away.


He always liked to do things early, way before the time. Then, if he got too busy, everything would work out fine.


She trimmed the stems and placed them in a very special vase. Then, sat the vase beside the portrait of his smiling face.


She would sit for hours, in her husband's favourite chair. While staring at his picture, and the roses sitting there.


A year went by, and it was to live without her mate. With loneliness and solitude, that had become her fate.


Then, the very hour, the doorbell rang, and there were roses sitting by her door.


She brought the roses in, and then just looked at them in shock. Then, went to get the telephone, to call the florist shop.


The owner answered, and she asked him, if he would explain, why would someone would do this to her, causing her such pain?


"I know your husband passed away, more than a year ago," The owner said, "I knew you'd call, and you would want to know. The flowers you received today, were paid for in advance. Your husband always planned ahead, he left nothing to chance. There is a standing order, that I have on file down here, and he has paid, well in advance, you'll get them every year.


There also is another thing, that I think you should know, he wrote a special little card... He did this years ago. Then, should ever I find out that he's no longer here, that's the card that should be sent to you the following year."


She thanked him and hung up the phone, her tears now flowing hard. Her fingers shaking, as she slowly reached to get the card.


Inside the card, she saw that he had written her a note. Then, as she stared in total silence, this is what he wrote...


"Hello my love, I know it's been a year since I've been gone. I hope it hasn't been too hard for you to overcome. I know it must be lonely, and the pain is very real. Or if it was the other way, I know how I would feel. The love we shared made everything so beautiful in life. I loved you more than words can say, you were the perfect wife. You were my friend and lover, you fulfilled my every need. I know it's only been a year, but please try not to grieve.


I want you to be happy, even when you shed your tears. That is why the roses will be sent to you for years. When you get these roses, think of all the happiness that we had together, and how both of us were blessed. I have always loved you and I know I always will. But, my love, you must go on, you have some living still.Please... Try to find happiness, while living out your days. I know it is not easy, but I hope you find some ways. The roses will come every year, and they will only stop, when your door's not answered, when the florist stops to knock. He will come five times that day, in case you have gone out. But after his last visit, he will know without a doubt! To take the roses to the place, where I've instructed him and place the roses where we are, together once again.”


Sometimes in life, you find a special friend; someone who changes your life just by being part of it...

Someone who makes you laugh until you can't stop; someone who makes you believe that there really is good in the world. Someone who convinces you that there really is an unlocked door just waiting for you to open it.

There’s nothing more I can add to this entry.

Back tomorrow.

Karen.


Don't let the b'stards get you down