"Roughly speaking those who work in connection with the [Automated Computing Engine] will be divided into its masters and its servants. Its masters will plan out instruction tables for it, thinking up deeper and deeper ways of using it. Its servants will feed it with cards as it calls for them. They will put right any parts that go wrong. They will assemble data that it requires. In fact the servants will take the place of limbs. As time goes on the calculator itself will take over the functions both of masters and of servants. The servants will be replaced by mechanical and electrical limbs and sense organs...
The masters are liable to get replaced because as soon as any technique becomes at all stereotyped it becomes possible to devise a set of instruction tables which will enable the electronic computer to do it for itself. It may happen however that the masters will refuse to do this.
They may be unwilling to let their jobs be stolen from them in this way. In that case they would surround the whole of their work with mystery and make excuses, couched in well chosen gibberish, whenever any dangerous suggestions were made. I think that a reaction of this kind is a very real danger.
- Alan Turing's Lecture on the Automated Computing Engine
The masters are liable to get replaced because as soon as any technique becomes at all stereotyped it becomes possible to devise a set of instruction tables which will enable the electronic computer to do it for itself. It may happen however that the masters will refuse to do this.
They may be unwilling to let their jobs be stolen from them in this way. In that case they would surround the whole of their work with mystery and make excuses, couched in well chosen gibberish, whenever any dangerous suggestions were made. I think that a reaction of this kind is a very real danger.
- Alan Turing's Lecture on the Automated Computing Engine
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