
News
Alan Turing’s enduring but complicated legacy (and timely message to EA)
We stand at the edge of a precipice: Six decades after Alan Turing’s suicide, we’ve found ourselves with access to the entire breadth of human knowledge, available anywhere, anytime, instantaneously. The light of progress burns ever-bright in the human breast, where hope also springs eternal; Turing’s formalization of the basic concepts of computer science—algorithms, his eponymous test, the idea of computation itself—have helped us get here. Technological advances have far outstripped social ones, and, if Turing were alive today, I’m sure he’d be ecstatic at our computing prowess. As a gay man, though, I don’t think he’d be quite so…