Artificial flowers in a synthetic garden

It might for instance be said that no machine could write good English or that it could not be influenced by sex-appeal or smoke a pipe. I cannot offer any such comfort, for I believe that no such bounds can be set. But I certainly hope and believe that no great efforts will be put into making machines with the most distinctively human, but non-intellectual characteristics such as the shape of the human body; it appears to me to be quite futile to make such attempts and their results could have something like the unpleasant quality of artificial flowers.

From ‘Can digital computers think?’, a talk by Alan Turing broadcast on BBC Radio in 1951. The entire manuscript is at the Turing Archive, here.

What qualities would Turing have discerned in the vast synthetic gardens that are algorithmically managed societies?

 

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