Too late, but thanks anyway
Via fjm, British government finally apologises for its appalling treatment of Alan Turing and other gay men.
By any sensible definition of sainthood, Alan Turing ought to have been canonised long ago (along with Alonzo Church, Haskell Curry, John Backus, John von Neumann, and a small host of other dead computer scientists, but that's another story for another time). The ability to capture something as powerful and as potentially complex as recursively enumerable computation in an idea as straightforward and easy-to-understand as the Universal Turing Machine is the stuff of legends, and the sheer breadth and depth of innovation that the Von Neumann architecture -- inspired pretty much directly by the Turing machine -- has made possible over the last sixty years is nothing short of miraculous. (Well, apart from the fact that we can trace the developments and where they came from, all the way back to the source, which is not common with miracles in the traditional sense. But I digress.)
No, I'm not asking the British government to fall all over itself in self-flagellation for what it did. Gordon Brown's apology is frank and dodges no bullets, and the lack of weaselling is commendable. I am asking, though, that the government keep in mind, moving forward, that it drove one of the most brilliant minds of his generation or any other to suicide over the crime of being different, and to adjust its policies accordingly.
I do not know, and cannot reasonably predict, what Alan Turing would have made of the rest of his life had he lived it to its natural end. Like all the great hackers, curiosity was forever nipping at his heels, and it could have driven him anywhere. Perhaps he would have pursued his passionate interest in human consciousness, or come up with a formalism for an even stronger computational mechanism -- the kind of thing we've blackboxed as an "oracle" for the last sixty years. Perhaps he would have settled down with a nice boy and taken up gardening. That would have been great too, because hey -- it wouldn't have been a life full of undeserved surveillance and forced chemical castration. People do better things with themselves when they're not under that kind of stress.
No, British government, it does not make it any better when you go from just keeping the queers under surveillance to putting everyone under surveillance.
And for everyone else -- let this serve as a lesson to you. Keep an eye on what your watchmen are doing to the different among you, because you're next. This is how social control works: test your procedures out on an "undesirable" sector of society, because who cares about them anyway, and refine the procedures to the point where they're still useful but are statistically unlikely to provoke much in the way of outrage. If the undesirables later lose their undesirable status, apologise for the ones you killed, and keep on going.
By any sensible definition of sainthood, Alan Turing ought to have been canonised long ago (along with Alonzo Church, Haskell Curry, John Backus, John von Neumann, and a small host of other dead computer scientists, but that's another story for another time). The ability to capture something as powerful and as potentially complex as recursively enumerable computation in an idea as straightforward and easy-to-understand as the Universal Turing Machine is the stuff of legends, and the sheer breadth and depth of innovation that the Von Neumann architecture -- inspired pretty much directly by the Turing machine -- has made possible over the last sixty years is nothing short of miraculous. (Well, apart from the fact that we can trace the developments and where they came from, all the way back to the source, which is not common with miracles in the traditional sense. But I digress.)
No, I'm not asking the British government to fall all over itself in self-flagellation for what it did. Gordon Brown's apology is frank and dodges no bullets, and the lack of weaselling is commendable. I am asking, though, that the government keep in mind, moving forward, that it drove one of the most brilliant minds of his generation or any other to suicide over the crime of being different, and to adjust its policies accordingly.
I do not know, and cannot reasonably predict, what Alan Turing would have made of the rest of his life had he lived it to its natural end. Like all the great hackers, curiosity was forever nipping at his heels, and it could have driven him anywhere. Perhaps he would have pursued his passionate interest in human consciousness, or come up with a formalism for an even stronger computational mechanism -- the kind of thing we've blackboxed as an "oracle" for the last sixty years. Perhaps he would have settled down with a nice boy and taken up gardening. That would have been great too, because hey -- it wouldn't have been a life full of undeserved surveillance and forced chemical castration. People do better things with themselves when they're not under that kind of stress.
No, British government, it does not make it any better when you go from just keeping the queers under surveillance to putting everyone under surveillance.
And for everyone else -- let this serve as a lesson to you. Keep an eye on what your watchmen are doing to the different among you, because you're next. This is how social control works: test your procedures out on an "undesirable" sector of society, because who cares about them anyway, and refine the procedures to the point where they're still useful but are statistically unlikely to provoke much in the way of outrage. If the undesirables later lose their undesirable status, apologise for the ones you killed, and keep on going.