A year after publishing “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” in 1950, Alan Turing took the same argument to the radio. On 15 May 1951 the BBC Third Programme broadcast his talk “Can Digital Computers Think?”, part of a series called “Automatic Calculating Machines”; it was repeated on 3 July of that year. In it Turing maintained that a digital computer could in principle be programmed to behave in a way that would warrant calling it thinking. He also delivered a second, more provocative talk under the title “Intelligent Machinery, a Heretical Theory.”
The eight-page typescript of “Can Digital Computers Think?”, with Turing’s own handwritten annotations, survives as reference AMT/B/5 in the Turing Papers at King’s College, Cambridge, and is digitized in the Turing Digital Archive. The broadcasts show that Turing was not content to make his case in an academic journal - he argued it to the general public at a time when very few electronic computers existed anywhere in the world.