Update to
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 Alan Turing: the Enigma |
Preface: Forty Years On
Alan Turing: the Enigma was published in the UK and the US in 1983. Later editions allowed minor corrections, and in 1992, 2012 and 2014 I added Prefaces offering updated information and comment. They marked growing public awareness of Alan Turing (hereafter 'AMT'). President Obama, addressing the British parliament in 2011, placed him alongside Newton and Darwin, and I could present him as a figure in world history without incurring ridicule. Ten years on, with the emergence of trillionaire Artificial Intelligence, there are new historical questions to consider.
I never planned the book for so long a life, but my approach to story-telling has helped to maintain its relevance. I bore in mind that what is now the past was once the unknown future. I wrote as if observing his doings with only a very limited vision of what lay ahead. I avoided anachronistic expressions, and was kept close to those mid-twentieth-century decades by long discussions with personal witnesses, many of whom subsequently reviewed the book and recommended it. The narrative ended with AMT's death in 1954, with few references to the aftermath or to the world of the 1970s and 1980s in which I worked. In short, it is not too 'dated' by its appearance in 1983, and remains a reliable account of AMT's life and work in an era that has almost slipped beyond human memory.
But the Notes now only document the sources available in 1983. They are no guide to current sources and scholarship. Much has changed.
- AMT's personal papers have been available online in the Turing Digital Archive since 2000.
- AMT's scientific papers have received extensive attention since 1992.
- Virtually all the Second World War cryptological material has been released from secrecy since 1996.
- Many other authors have engaged with AMT's life and thought.
So necessarily additions and corrections to my main text must be considered, prompted by the emergence of hitherto secret documents and the vastly expanded discussion. Learned papers are now devoted to scraps of manuscript once thought insignificant.
Some questions have already been addressed in my own publications since 1983. For example, one purpose of my short Philosophy book (1997, reissued 2021) was to explain the relevance to AMT's thought of Roger Penrose's critique of AI. But this and other conceptual developments now need to be absorbed into a consistent reassessment.
Those published Prefaces of 1992, 2012 and 2014 also served to document extra items of historical material. These discoveries must be retained, but consolidated into a readable narrative. And yet more material has come to light since 2014.
How can this be achieved? Since 1995 this website has given readers of the book an extra resource, and allowed the informal publication of new information and insights. My policy is now to extend this Book Update section more systematically. It will review every aspect of AMT's story. I will also explain more about my sources and my witnesses, who are now almost all lost to us, before I myself pass on.
This grounding in first-hand evidence is all the more important as since 1983, artistic visions of AMT's life and work have overwhelmed public consciousness. In poetry, literary fiction, science fiction, graphic novels, plays, drama-documentaries, films, operas, oratorios, and art installations, fictional representations of AMT have proliferated. And now AI applications, trained on such material, can invent without limit. Some fictions have passed into what is thought to be common knowledge. Other fictions are admired as Greater Truths. This update is intended for those who appreciate lesser and sometimes inconvenient factual observations. I have to thank the many readers who over forty years have assisted me.
Update Index | Preface | Parts 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | BP | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | Authors Note
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