Alan Turing: Artificial intelligence as human self-knowledge

Abstract

This article explores the life and ideas of Alan Turing (1912-1954), commonly known as the father of artificial intelligence (AI), and highlights the process whereby the human self is reconceptualized in the development of Turing's ideas of machine intelligence. I will further illustrate how this process of self-reconceptualization - composed of the pursuit, adaptation and transformation of self-knowledge - is closely related to contemporary digital life. In doing so, I wish to reveal the ways in which Turing's underlying self-transforming agenda of AI can contribute to our understanding of the human self, for AI, as I will argue, leads to questions of existence and existential anxieties.