  Turing relished the paradox of ‘Machine Intelligence’: an apparent contradiction in terms. It is likely that he was already savouring this theme in 1941, when he read a theological book by the author Dorothy Sayers (Sayers 1941). In (Turing 1948) he quoted from this work to illustrate his full awareness that in common parlance ‘mechanical’ was used to to mean ‘devoid of intelligence.’ Giving a date which no doubt had his highly sophisticated Enigma-breaking machines secretly in mind, he wrote that ‘up to 1940’ only very limited machinery had been used, and this ‘encouraged the belief that machinery was necessarily limited to extremely straightforward, possibly even to repetitious, jobs.’ His object was to dispel these connotations. 