Machines Like Me

I remembered from an old magazine profile that Turing lived next door to a famous sculptor. The journalist had improbably conjured deep conversations over the garden fence. Before pressing the doorbell, I paused to collect myself. The great man had asked to see me and I was nervous. Who could match Alan Turing? It was all his – the theoretical exposition of a Universal Machine in the thirties, the possibilities of machine consciousness, the celebrated war work: some said he did more than any single individual towards winning the war; others claimed he personally shortened it by two years; then working with Francis Crick on protein structure, then, a few years later, with two King’s College Cambridge friends, finally solving P versus NP, and using the solution to devise superior neural networks and revolutionary software for X-ray crystallography; helping to devise the first protocols for the Internet, then the World Wide Web; the famous collaboration with Hassabis, whom he’d first met – and lost to – at a chess tournament; founding with young Americans one of the giant companies of the digital age, dispensing his wealth for good causes, and throughout his working life, never losing track of his intellectual beginnings as he dreamed up ever better digital models of general intelligence. But no Nobel Prize. I was also, being worldly, impressed by Turing’s wealth. He was easily as rich as the tech moguls who flourished south of Stanford, California or east of Swindon, England. The sums he gave away were as large as theirs. But none of them could boast of a statue in bronze in Whitehall, outside the Ministry of Defence. He was so far above wealth that he could afford to live in edgy Camden rather than Mayfair. He didn’t trouble himself to own a private jet, or even a second home. It was said he travelled by bus to his institute at King’s Cross.

I put my thumb on the doorbell and pressed. Instantly, a woman’s voice said through an inset speaker, ‘Name please.’

The lock buzzed, I pushed the door and entered a grand hallway of standard mid-Victorian design with a chequered tile floor. Coming towards me down the stairs was a mildly plump woman of my age with red cheeks, long straight hair and a friendly lopsided smile. I waited for her, then used my left hand to shake hers.

‘Charlie.’

‘Kimberley.’

Australian. I followed her deeper into the house on the ground floor. I was expecting to arrive in a large sitting room of books and paintings and outsized sofas, where I might soon be drinking a gin and tonic with the Master. Kimberley opened a narrow door and ushered me into a windowless conference room. A long table in limed beech, ten straight-backed chairs, neatly set-out notepads, sharpened pencils and water glasses, fluorescent strip lighting, a wall-mounted whiteboard alongside a two-metre-wide TV screen.

‘He’ll be a few minutes.’ She smiled and left and I sat, and set about trying to lower my expectations.

I didn’t have much time. In less than a minute he was before me and I was getting to my feet in an awkward hurry. In memory, I see a flash, an eruption of red, his brilliant red shirt against white walls in fluorescent light. We shook hands without exchanging a word and he waved me back into my seat as he went around the table to sit opposite me.

‘So …’ He rested his chin on his clasped hands and regarded me intensely. I did my best to hold his gaze but I was too flustered and soon looked away. Again, in recollection, his focussed look merges with that of the elderly Lucian Freud, thirty years later. Solemn yet impatient, hungry, even ferocious. The face across from me registered not only the years but vast social changes and personal triumphs. I had seen versions of it in black and white, photos taken in the early months of the war – broad, chubbily boyish, dark hair smartly parted, and tweed jacket over knitted jumper and tie. The transformation would have come about during his Californian years in the sixties when he was working with Crick at the Salk Institute and then at Stanford – the time of his association with the poet, Thom Gunn and his circle – gay, bohemian, seriously intellectual by day, wild at night. Turing had met the undergraduate Gunn briefly at a party in Cambridge in 1952. In San Francisco he would have had no interest in the younger man’s ‘experiments’ in drugs, but the rest would have paralleled the general unbuttoning in the west.

There was to be no small talk. ‘So, Charlie. Tell me all about your Adam.’