The Blindness of Computers

Turing also mentioned incredibly briefly this thing called the Oracle machine. He literally says like, we will not say anything about the Oracle machine except of course that it cannot be a machine, which is an incredibly brilliant kind of paradoxical statement./nBut what the Oracle is, the Oracle is literally something else communicating with the computer. So it's saying like instead of just having an automated machine, this completely selfcontained and computational object, a kind of tiny set of instructions in a box, you have something that is capable of communicating with the wider world, not just communicating but listening to it, taking some kind of prompt from it./nAnd this is the kind of computation that was subsequently explored by. Feels like cybernetics, various kinds of robotics. Basically computer systems that tried to look to the world around them to understand something./nMy classic example of an Oracle machine is quite appropriately a random number generator. It's one of the real problems of computer systems is that they can't generate true random numbers because of course they're just stepping through this set of automatic processes and you can't create randomness, i.e. something completely unexpected, by going through a set of programmed expected steps./nBut random numbers are really necessary. They're needed for kind of cryptographics, for credit card transactions, for example. They're needed for lotteries, for example./nAnd lottery machines have come up with all kinds of weird ways of generating random.