Gordon Brown apologizes to Alan Turing - 57 years later

What a hypocritical shit he is. Thousands of men were persecuted for being gay, and he apologizes to one of them. Why? because Turing was a "war hero"!

 

A Turing machine that is able to simulate any other Turing machine is called a Universal Turing machine

The government has given an initial rebuff to the campaign for a pardon for Alan Turing, the brilliant British 'father of the computer' whose career ended in tragedy after a gross indecency conviction at a time when gay sex was against the law.

Signatures are gathering on an e-petition for a pardon but the justice minister Lord McNally used the precedent argument to discourage the notion in the House of Lords.

Asked by the Liberal Democrat Lord Sharkey whether a pardon would be considered, to mark this year's centenary of Turing's birth which is the subject of international scientific celebrations, he told peers:

Quote:

The question of granting a posthumous pardon to Mr Turing was considered by the previous Government in 2009.

As a result of the previous campaign, the then Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued an unequivocal posthumous apology to Mr Turing on behalf of the Government, describing his treatment as "horrifying" and "utterly unfair". Mr Brown said the country owed him a huge debt. This apology was also shown at the end of the Channel 4 documentary celebrating Mr Turing's life and achievements which was broadcast on 21 November 2011.

A posthumous pardon was not considered appropriate as Alan Turing was properly convicted of what at the time was a criminal offence. He would have known that his offence was against the law and that he would be prosecuted.

It is tragic that Alan Turing was convicted of an offence which now seems both cruel and absurd-particularly poignant given his outstanding contribution to the war effort. However, the law at the time required a prosecution and, as such, long-standing policy has been to accept that such convictions took place and, rather than trying to alter the historical context and to put right what cannot be put right, ensure instead that we never again return to those times.

This weekend marks the centenary of Alan Turing's birth. Turing was one of the greatest computer scientist of all time. In a 1950 paper that outlined what has come to be known as the Turing Test he offered a way out of endless philosophical speculation about whether computers could ever be classed as 'intelligent.' He said that if human judges ask interview questions of a hidden computer and a hidden person and cannot tell the difference after five minutes, the computer should be considered intelligent. Nowadays, programmers compete yearly for the Loebner Prize, which is won by the computer that is most often mistaken for a human. 

 

But the Turing Test's application is no longer limited to questions of artificial intelligence: Social scientists too are getting in on the action and using the test in a completely new way -- to compare different human subjects and their ability to pass as members of groups to which they do not belong, such as religious and ethnic minorities or particular professional classes. With the Turing Test, sociologists can compare the extent to which subjects can understand people who are different from them in some way.

In the words of sociologists, what they're now studying is called "interactional expertise." The easiest way to understand what interactional expertise entails is to contrast it with a more common idea, contributory expertise. Contributory experts are the typical array of professionals (physicists, chemists, lawyers, economists, musicians etc.) who develop specialized knowledge and skill through formal education and long experience.

Interactional experts, by contrast, are not primary practitioners. They learn about a field primarily bytalking with the people who have acquired contributory expertise. The new claim is that linguistic socialization enables interactional experts to acquire enough tacit knowledge to see the world from a contributory expert's perspective. Their existence defies the cliché that understanding a person necessitates walking a mile in his or her shoes. Interactional experts can do more than talk the talk -- they can 'walk the talk' or, really, 'talk the walk' by offering authoritative technical judgments, making inside jokes, and raising devil's advocate questions that revolve around ideas normally known only to specialists.

Nearly 60 years after his death, there is a campaign to pardon Alan Turing, and the British parliament is poised to grant him a pardon this month. [...]

Peter Tatchell has pushed for a pardon for Alan Turing for many years. He is a Human Rights campaigner who has focused frequently, but not exclusively, on LGBT issues. He says the British Government should pardon Alan Turing because it's a good starting point for doing right by the 50,000 to 100,000 people who were charged under the law.

Ms Barnes said: “I consider it to be fair and just that everybody who was convicted under the Gross Indecency law is given a pardon. It is illogical that my great uncle has been the only one to be pardoned when so many were convicted of the same crime. I feel sure that Alan Turing would have also wanted justice for everybody.”

[...]

“Men convicted of gross indecency were often considered to have brought huge shame on their families and many took their own lives. We still live with the legacy of this period today and it’s about time the country addressed this appalling part of our history.”

"To accept a pardon means you accept that you were guilty. I was not guilty of anything. I was only guilty of being in the wrong place at the wrong time," he told BBC Newsnight.

"I think it was wrong to give Alan Turing - one of the heroes of my life - a pardon.

"What was he guilty of? He was guilty of the same as what they called me guilty of - being born only able to fall in love with another man."

He added: "If I get an apology, I will not need a pardon."

He added that there "never should have been an offence of gross indecency".

"It didn't apply to heterosexuals. Heterosexuals could do what they liked, in the doorways, in passageways, the back of their car.

"It only applied to gay men. That's not right, surely?"