[ExI] RES: temporary open season on turing

[Anders Sandberg]

While von Braun might have helped the US get to the Moon, we should not 
forget the Great Engineer, aka Sergei Korolev on the other side. 
Actually, when considering space races as a good thing, we should 
probably revere him even more for his fairly clear vision of 1) he 
wanted to colonize space (in part continuing the Russian Cosmism 
ideology that many of us knowingly or not adhere to), 2) he figured out 
how to sell this idea to the people with power (using small steps - 
"Wouldn't it be useful to have better rocket launchers?" "Wouldn't it be 
useful to have better missiles?" "Wouldn't it be better to have 
satellites?"), and 3) he was actually good at realizing it. He started 
his project earlier than anybody else, and had he been in a slightly 
more sane society he would have gone much farther.

But while we can revere Korolev, von Braun, Crick & Watson and 
Heisenberg, I don't think any of them really had the same profound broad 
intellectual impact as Turing. The rocket guys changed the world for 
good and ill, but they did not really change the way we think. Crick & 
Watson found a very important structure, but the genetic revolution was 
done by many others (Gamow, Nirenberg, Khorana, Holley, Berg and so on). 
Heisenberg was part of the quantum revolution but not the originator or 
final word. While his uncertainty relation is the part of quantum 
mechanics most people know about, it is not really the center of it.

If I wanted to list a scientist who shows up as broadly as Turing, I 
would suggest von Neumann instead. Algebra, logic, set theory, nuclear 
weapons, self replication, quantum information, game theory, ENIAC, 
merge sort, cellular automata, statistical mechanics... he shows up 
*everywhere*.

-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Faculty of Philosophy
Oxford University