It’s a reference to Bernard Shaw, who once said that if we ever created a truly artificial mind it would be inside a turtle’s shell. Sturgill Simpson covered the track on his seminal work, Xeno’s Paradox.
Might be a reference to the story at the beginning of A Brief History of Time, attributed to Bertrand Russell’s audience member.
Full story in the book
This guy remembers what I thought I was saying. In my defense I stole the whole thing from Stephen King’s It which I read … forty years ago, that can’t be accurate. Let me sort out my instruments and get back to you.
an LLM tells me there is no evidence that Bernard Shaw ever said any such thing :)