I am proud to have added my name to those calling for the government for formally apologize for the prosecution of Alan Turing that many believe led to his untimely death by suicide.
I, like many, regard Alan Turing as a modern day hero. A genius, an athlete, a war hero, and the father of computer science as we know it today, Turing would be deserving of the recognition of his country and his countrymen even he had not been, by our modern sensibilities, brutalised and criminalised by the state that he loyally served. (If you want to know about Turin, his Wikipedia entry is excellent, or you could watch the marvelous “Breaking the Code” starring Derek Jacobi).
I rarely agree with the notion of one generation apologising for the mistakes, transgressions, and sins of another. The apology seems somewhat hollow, an embarrased nod in the direction of culpability at best. We must accept, surely, that the accepted morality of any time has a “sell by” date and, as we move into what we believe to be a more understanding and compassionate world, it seems churlish to feel that we have to make amends for the mistakes of people living in a different time for whom the world would have seemed very different and for whom morality would have been very different indeed. By its very definition, the “progress” that makes our world better and brighter must make the past dimmer and darker by comparison. On the other hand, perhaps this objection is nothing more than a latent fear that someday some ancestor of mine will have to apologize for some transgression on my part, some poorly informed misjudgment that I make today with all good intentions.
Whatever the case, my rare agreement today exists that something should be done to formally honour Turing, who is without doubt one of the most important minds of the last 100 years and one of our most significant thinkers.
With this in mind, if I could control the form the apology would take, it would be as much needed funding for Bletchley Park, the place in which Turin achieved his greatest breakthroughs and with which he will forever be associated. That, or enough money to create an AI that would finally past the Turing Test.
And we shall call it Alan.