My study on Alan Turing and a specific part of his work uses a poetic/filosoficalapproach and takes the form of a play; hence it will differ from the various papers presented here.
My aim was not to produce a biographical work on Turing but rather to create a theatrical setting in which individuals who exist in different spatial and temporal contexts but are closely linked in AI genealogy, meet on a virtual plane; individuals who, in both cases, have been branded as “outsiders”.
Thus, stylised moments in Turing’s life, which has all the makings of a modern tragedy but with comic overtones stemming from the bizarre nature of this eminent mathematician known for his eccentricity and contempt of power, and his disarming honesty and free spirit, “virtually” collide with the adventures of two young present-day hackers who meet up with him while surfing the Net.
The Turing Test is “reinvented” and transformed into a theatrical mechanism, a deus ex machina that brings the two young hackers, actors in the cyber culture created by the Net, into contact with Alan Turing, whose work at the Foreign Office during the Second World War makes him the original hacker. The cyber culture, more than anything else, embodies the advantages and contradictions of that remarkable invention known as the computer which is now a part of our daily lives; an invention which, like few others, has seriously questioned some of the paradigmatic structures of Western thought by causing us increasingly to ask what intelligence, thought, consciousness, reality, fantasy, freedom of information, intellectual property and access to knowledge really mean.
By interweaving the two worlds and following a continuous thread, I have sought to represent in a stylised way the evolution of the thought paradigm, from the pioneering research conducted by Alan Turing to the Artificial Intelligence of the late 1950s (the MIT Strong Artificial Intelligence Programme was presented two years after Turing’s death), and the revolutionary technological era in which we are now living, which will certainly be – as our protagonist intuited – the beginning of a new and contradictory period in the life of the individual and his relationship with society.
For further reading, I would refer you to the introduction by Giulio Giorello.

Top