Universal Turing Machine

'Marriage ought to be more than a refuge, I thought. Better sorry than safe.’ 1993, 26

So many mistakes, so little time.

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'Writing, however, was at best a part-time activity, because I also needed to live, to have experiences to note in my diary for use in future books.' 2003, 36

What goes around comes around.

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'A random plague revived interest in the meaning of life – a leaflet came through the door inviting me to Zoom with the Jehovah’s Witnesses.’ 2020, 53

Some people never give up. I admire that.

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'Neither branch of the family contained writers, though Mum did love to edit the furniture.' 1973, 6

Feels like there's a perfect arrangement for everything. Maybe there is.

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'Write what you know, and on my mind was the high error count of an ordinary life like mine.' 2022, 55

How could it be otherwise? Read the Machine, find out.

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'This was the endgame and the opening of the game, a continuation, a loop, and computers of all ages and sizes loved nothing better than a repetitive loop.' 1967, 0

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'I was in awe of love and I ached with love, a teenager greedy for the heightened reality that flagged time travel, incoming from the past, from the future.’ 1984, 17

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'In the actual real-life 2001, when the second plane flew into the second tower, no-one could say for certain whether the minds behind 9/11 were corrupted by too much thinking or not enough.' 2001, 34

Some bits of history cut through.

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'In the USA they had Trump and in Britain we had Brexit, as if being smart suddenly wasn’t important. Human stupidity made itself known, suggesting that at this specific moment we lost sight of certain objectives.’ 2018, 51

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'I calculated the maths of animal life: approach or avoid, plus or minus, with only a million years of genetic memory to help me with these decisions.' 1969, 2

We're never as alone as we think.

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'I was from the last generation of true believers in the written word, both as a medium for self-expression and an act of resistance. The page was a place where time stopped. What was left? What was written.'

Open some pages of stopped time, any time you like.

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A summer of reading Contributors to Engelsberg Ideas share the books they’ve enjoyed in the summers of their lives.

'A most original masterpiece'.

The Universal Turing Machine, as recommended in Engelsberg Ideas.

engelsbergideas.com/essays/a-sum...

'I love you. I love you most enthusiastically. I thought about her all the time, which in terms of progress at school wasn’t the optimal use of my brainpower.' 1982, 15

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'Over her lifetime the Duchess had got so much of what she wanted that she was largely immune to pleasure. She felt at best a mild satisfaction when something was almost as good as it used to be.' 1991, 24

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'In Alexandria I was drugged and robbed, and down the Nile in Aswan a Canadian backpacker sold me to an Egyptian riverboat captain for a lump of hash.' 1985, 18

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'I valued my privilege of books and cricket more than I disliked oppression and pain, first my own and by extension anyone else’s.' 1979, 12

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'I predicted that by 2028 I’d still be frightened by a future I couldn’t see, tempting me to prepare by fearing the worst. I knew this or that bad thing was going to happen (1978, 11; 2003, 36; 2017, 50 and so on).' 2028, 61

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'God, we were told, could be trusted with the computing. The secret of life as coded into religion involved reckoning and accounting, machine-like calculations reframed as judgments. God assessed the data of a life, then handed out rewards and punishments.' 1981,14

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'In the small lit clearing of my brief time on earth, I hadn’t helped myself by overdoing the absences. Decoherence was a problem. Did I say this before? I’ll say it again.' 2030, 63

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'Ideally, I’d now accumulate knowledge with maximum efficiency, storing data in an unlimited searchable memory, but though I learned loads of new stuff I couldn’t always remember it.' 1975, 8

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'It was very easy to drink in Tokyo, which made me dislike myself and was breaking up my face. Also, the Japanese weather had no brilliance. It was one thing or another. The rain set in, and that was rain for the rest of the day.' 2006, 39

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"At a dinner I mistook 'la magie noire' for 'l’imaginaire', and insisted with passion that I believed in black magic and would continue to do so until the day I died." 1992, 25

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'What I loved about rugby was that it wasn’t in my head, and didn’t allow me to favour mind over matter. I couldn’t afford to be separate from my body because the back-row forwards out to clatter me were ninety-eight percent matter.' 2002, 35

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'By this age Dad (1959, 20) was a fixture in the Victoria Road office of E.W.Beard Ltd, embarking on a working life featuring an above-average number of Rons.' 1987, 20.

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'Chess was more popular when times were unsettled, because playing chess looked clever, in control. Our brains were smart enough to make out invisible patterns and to see the future.' 1972, 5.

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'For one reason then another my body and its needs snagged me in the present. Sex, hunger, pain, that kind of thing.' 2021, 54.

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'I was a creative person, I knew I was – look at the mess I’d made of everything else.' (1993, 26)

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'A super-intelligent AGI, for example, ought to be able to keep the Singularity a secret (2017, 50), perhaps by pretending to be stupid (2025, 58).' (1974, 7)

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'A man provided with paper, pencil and rubber, and subject to strict discipline, is in effect a universal machine.'

From 'Intelligent Machinery: A Report by A. M. Turing' (1948).

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'This is a reading experience not a game, a memoir about what it means to live a human, unartificially intelligent life.'

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