I was asked about my favourite historical figure

British spelling

As curious as I am, I like reading about people who have done incredible things in history. Of course, it’s really hard to pick only one favourite historical figure.

One of my super favourite historical figures is Alan Turing. I chose Dr. Turing, who was a British mathematician and Cambridge University professor, because I admire his extraordinary intelligence, his logic, his critical thinking, and his work in cryptography for the British government during the Second World War.

He broke the code of the Enigma machines that Nazis used to send clandestine messages.

Thanks to Turing and his small team of cryptographers the war was shortened by several years and thousands of lives were saved.

Despite being not only a national hero for Britain but for the world as a whole, he was sentenced to chemical castration because he was gay, which was considered a crime at the time. And if you think about it, that was not so long ago but just a few decades into the past. I also think the decision was mean.

They thought that to be fair they would give him an alternative: he could choose to spend two years in prison.

To be able to continue with his work in freedom he chose chemical castration instead. Most likely his life would have been hell in prison. So he chose to stay in his home working.

The treatment results were devastating for both Turing’s health and his emotional wellbeing.

Tragically, after a year of treatment, in 1954, he was found dead from cyanide poisoning. An inquest ruled that it was suicide. It was a few days before his 42nd birthday.

From my point of view, Alan Turing was a genius who saved Europe from the Nazis. In return, he was exposed as a ‘criminal’ and forced into killing himself. I feel extremely sorry for what they did to him.

Alan Turing is also considered the father of artificial intelligence due to his advances in computer science. Perhaps you have heard about the Turing test, which he originally called the Imitation Game in 1950. This is a series of questions he designed to test a machine’s ability to show intelligent behaviour equivalent to that of a human.

Up to this date, no AI has successfully passed the Turing test yet, although some have come rather close.

It’s a pity his sexuality was more important to those in power than his incredible intelligence, critical thinking, research work, and contributions to global peace, science, and technology.

I admire Alan Turing for many reasons. He was an extraordinary human being. I also believe AI would have advanced faster if he wouldn’t have died so young.

Can we judge the past with today’s lens?

This is not an easy question. For instance, Turing was unfairly treated and there is no doubt about it. Yet, it was a different world. It was a more rigid world where people in power liked to tell others the way they should live, what was right and what was wrong.

It was different than today, but not completely different, though.

Humans will never learn from the past.

Today, as it is, we are seeing a modern witch hunt. Interestingly enough, it’s also related to Turing’s Imitation Game.

Future historians will see today’s world with a different lens. They, too, will judge.

And those historians might well be AI beings.

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About the writer: Susan Fourtané is a science and technology journalist, professional writer, dead media archeologist, photography enthusiast, a free-spirited maverick, and sometimes a hermit. She travels capturing the essence of what she thinks it’s interesting.