He cracked the Nazi Enigma code—and may haveshortened World War II by two years. He helped invent the modern computer—before the term even existed.He asked a question no one had dared to ask: “Can machines think?” And then set out to answer it.
His name was Alan Turing. A Cambridge mathematician turned wartime cryptanalyst, Turing worked in secret at Bletchley Park, leading the effort to break Germany’s unbreakable code.After WWII he turned his mind to the next frontier: intelligent machines and proposed the Imitation Game—what we now call the Turing Test—as a way to measure whether a machine could convincingly mimic human conversation.
We brought Alan Turing to 2025 to ask what he thinks of his legacy. We may not be happy with his reponse.
More information:
They Tried to Warn Us, the book: More info on each podcast interview subject, along with 15 more interviews.
They Tried to Warn Us, the newsletter: Follow the action on Ray's Substack.
Information
- Show
- FrequencyUpdated Weekly
- PublishedAugust 19, 2025 at 7:05 AM UTC
- Length9 min
- Season1
- Episode6
- RatingClean