Digital Civilization

However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion. GEORGE WASHINGTON, Farewell Address, Sep. 17, 1796

Turing was captivated by the potential of the computer he had conceived. Although his 1936 work had shown the absolute limitations of the computable, he had become fascinated by what Turing machines could do, rather than by what they could not. He had long abandoned his youthful expectations of finding free will or free spirits through quantum mechanics. His later thought was strongly determinist and atheistic in character. And by the end of the Second World War he had turned against the tentative idea that there were steps of 'intuition' in human thought corresponding to uncomputable operations. Instead, he held that the computer would offer unlimited scope for practical progress towards embodying intelligence in an artificial form.

From the 1870s onward, the ideas that history and civilization were inherently progressive and that progress was always good came under increasing attack.

Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection undermined the religious certainty

Karl Marx argued there were fundamental contradictions within the capitalist system