If we look at Alan Turing's legacy through McLuhan's lens, a pattern emerges: that of feigning, of deception and interchangeability. If we had to summarize Turing's diverse work and influence, both intentional and inadvertent, we might say he is an engineer of pretenses, as much as a philosopher of them.

The most obvious example of this logic can be found in the now famous Turing Test, the name later given to the imitation game Turing proposed in the 1950 article "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," published in the journal Mind. The paper ponders the question "Can machines think?", meditating at length on the difficulty in answering this question given the ambiguity of the terms "machine" and "think."

Turing suggests replacing thought or intelligence with imitation. He proposes an "imitation game" in which a human would be asked to interact by teletype with two parties hidden behind closed doors. The first would be another human, the second a machine. Each tries to convince the human judge that it is in fact the human.

In proposing the imitation game as a stand-in for another definition of thought or intelligence, Turing does more than deliver a clever logical flourish that helps him creatively answer a very old question about what makes someone (or something) capable of thought. In fact, he really skirts the question of intelligence entirely, replacing it with the outcomes of thought--in this case, the ability to perform "being human" as convincingly and interestingly as a real human. To be intelligent is to act like a human rather than to have a mind that operates like one. Or, even better, intelligence--whatever it is, the thing that goes on inside a human or a machine--is less interesting and productive a topic of conversation than the effects of such a process, the experience it creates in observers and interlocutors.

This is a kind of pretense most readily found on stage and on screen. An actor's craft is best described in terms of its effect, the way he or she portrays a part, elicits emotion, and so forth. While it's certainly also possible to talk about the method by which that outcome emerges (the Stanizlavski method or the Meisner technique, for example) nobody would mistake those processes for the outcomes they produce. That is to say, an actor's performance is not reducible to the logic by which he or she executes that performance.

A computer, it turns out, is just a particular kind of machine that works by pretending to be another machine.

Turing did not invent the term "artificial intelligence," but his work has been enormously influential in that field. Nevertheless, artificial intelligence fails to learn Turing's lesson on intelligence: the processes by which thought takes place are not incidental, but they are also not primary. So-called "strong AI" hopes to make computers as intelligent as people, often by attempting to create models of human cognition, or even better to argue that the brain itself works like a computer. But Turing never claimed that computers can be intelligent nor that they are artificial. He simply suggested that it would be appealing to consider how computers might perform well at the imitation game -- how they might pretend to seem human in interesting ways.