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I would argue that as he approached the end of his life James had decided that he no longer
cared to deny the dirty human secret that the impulse to cheat is an innate one, and as such is an
impulse that any thinking machine ought to be able to mimic: this is almost (but not quite) what
Turing said. True, his thinking machines would be programmed to cheat, but not gratuitously
as Eusepia Palladino had done. Rather, the machine would cheat strategically. When asked to
solve arithmetic problems, it ‘would deliberately introduce mistakes in a manner calculated to
confuse the interrogator’.^34 When asked whether it was ‘only pretending to be a man’, it would
be ‘permitted all sorts of tricks so as to appear more man-like, such as waiting a bit before giving
an answer, or making a spelling mistake . . . ’.^35 Permitted is the key word here, since the cheating
in this case was not meant to be detectable—that is to say, it is not its penchant for cheating per
se that will convince the interrogator that the machine is human, but rather it is the impression
of human fallibility that the cheating facilitates. Unless, of course, either the interrogator or
the human player is telepathic: then the jig will be up for the machine, for a telepath can see,
if not into the machine’s circuitry, then into that of its human competitor. Were telepaths to
admit their gifts, they would be disqualified from playing. But what if they did not? The only
solution that Turing could come up with was an impracticable one: ‘To put the competitors in
a “telepathy-proof room” would satisfy all requirements’.^36
fair play to the machines
What really motivates all this speculation about telepathy, I think, is Turing’s anxiety about the
possibility of thinking machines being subjected to bigotry and persecution. As early as 1947 he
had been calling for ‘fair play to the machines’, even as he worried about ‘the great opposition’
that the thinking machine would meet—in particular ‘from the intellectuals who were afraid of
being put out of a job’:^37
It is probable that the intellectuals would be mistaken about this. There would be plenty to do
[trying to understand what the machines were trying to say], i.e. in trying to keep one’s intel-
ligence up to the standard set by the machines, for it seems probable that once the machine
thinking method has started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers.
Among other advantages that the machines would have would be immortality—‘There
would be no question of the machines dying’—and the capacity to ‘converse with each other to
sharpen their wits’: conversations, presumably, on which humans could no more listen in than
they could detect the hum of a random number generator at work. On the one hand, such a
scenario seems to have provoked in Turing a mischievous delight that he could not quite resist
voicing: ‘At some stage therefore we should have to expect the machines to take control, in the
way that is mentioned in Samuel Butler’s “Erewhon” ’. On the other, his fear for the machines’
fate comes across as painfully personal:^38
Many people are extremely opposed to the idea of [a] machine that thinks, but I do not believe
that it is for any of the reasons that I have given, or any other rational reason, but simply because
they do not like the idea. One can see many features which make it unpleasant. If a machine
can think, it might think more intelligently than we do, and then where should we be? Even if
we could keep the machine in a subservient position, for instance by turning off the power at
strategic moments, we should, as a species, feel greatly humbled.