Machines Like Me

By living openly from 1969 with his lover, Tom Reah, the theoretical physicist who would win the Nobel Prize in 1989, Turing helped give weight to a gathering social revolution. When the AIDS epidemic broke out he raised a huge sum to set up a virology institute in Dundee and was co-founder of a hospice. After the first effective treatments appeared, he campaigned for short licences and low prices, especially in Africa. He continued to collaborate with Hassabis, who had run his own group since 1972. Turing gradually lost patience with public engagements, so he said, and preferred to concentrate on his work in ‘my shrinking years’. Behind him were his long residency in San Francisco, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and a banquet in his honour with President Carter, lunch with Mrs Thatcher at Chequers to discuss science funding, dinner with the President of Brazil to persuade him to protect the Amazon. For a long while, he was the face of the computer revolution, and the voice of the new genetics, almost as famous as Stephen Hawking. Now he was a near-recluse. His only journeys were between his house in Camden Town and his Institute in King’s Cross, two doors down from the Hassabis Centre.

Reah wrote a long poem about his and Turing’s life together, published in the TLS and then in book form. The poet and critic Ian Hamilton said in a review, ‘Here is a physicist who can imagine as well as scan. Now bring me the poet who can explain quantum gravity.’ When Adam appeared in my life, I believed that only a poet, not a machine, could tell me if Miranda would ever love me, or lie to me.

*

There must have been Turing algorithms buried in the software of the Exocet series 8 missiles that a French company, MBDA, had sold to the Argentine government. This fearsome weapon, once fired from a jet in the general direction of a ship, could recognise its profile and decide mid-flight whether it was hostile or friendly. If the latter, it aborted its mission and plunged harmlessly into the sea. If it missed its target and overshot, it was able to double back and make two more attempts. It closed on its prey at 5,000 miles an hour. Its opt-out capacity was probably based on face-recognition software that Turing developed in the mid-sixties. He had been looking for ways to help people with prosopagnosia, a condition in which sufferers are unable to recognise familiar faces. Government immigration control, defence companies and security firms raided the work for their own purposes.

Since France was a NATO partner, strong representations were made to the Elysée Palace by our government that MBDA should be prevented from selling more Exocets or from providing technical assistance. A consignment bound for Peru, Argentina’s ally, was blocked. But other countries, including Iran, were willing to sell. There was also a black market. British agents, posing as arms dealers, bought up the supply.

But the spirit of the free market was irrepressible. The Argentinian military desperately needed help with the Exocet software, which had not been fully installed by the time the conflict began. Two Israeli experts, acting on their own, presumably on the offer of huge financial reward, flew to Argentina. It was never discovered who cut their throats in a Buenos Aires hotel. Many assumed it was British intelligence agents. If so, they were too late. On the day the young Israelis bled to death in their beds, four British ships were sunk, the next day another three went down, and on the third, another. In all, an aircraft carrier, destroyers, frigates and a troop carrier were sunk. The loss of life was in the low thousands. Sailors, troops, cooks, doctors and nurses, journalists. After days of confusion, with all military efforts concentrated on rescuing survivors, the rump of the Task Force turned back and the Falkland Islands became Las Malvinas. The fascist junta that ruled Argentina was jubilant, its popularity soared, its murder, torture and disappearances of its citizens were forgotten or forgiven. Its hold on power was consolidated.