The field of AI dates back to Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage, but to keep this more current and less abstract, I will start this story with MIT and early-day Silicon Valley.
Marvin Minsky (1927–2016) and John McCarthy (1927–2011) founded MIT’s CSAIL Lab1 and are responsible for many of the field’s foundations, including LISP2 and early attempts at building robots and intelligence systems.
The AI Way of Looking at Intelligence
The Linguistic Approach of Looking at Computers
In comparison, Alan Kay, Douglas Engelbart (1925–2013), and many other colleagues have been drawing attention to learning systems composed of people and machines.
I once attended a conference (Techonomy) and asked
after their talk if anyone is thinking about the psyche of AI scientists.There is a crucial bias (politics) in calling a machine intelligence. It frames the whole project, our expectation of a system, and our perceived value.
Did you ever consider why we talk to our car when it does not start? If it were an autonomous decision-making system, you would.
The Politics of Technology
Like other matters of politics, deciding whether the brain is a computer problem is a matter of belief, and I know better than to try to convince people of their beliefs. My stance3 is heavily influenced by complexity and does not buy that my creativity and living language are functions of knowledge systems. All binary systems are statistical knowledge systems, and we know that human language is symbolic (neurlogically)4. Others take the cybernetic view that the world is made of feedback loops and that there is nothing more than n-dimensional feedback loops.
The belief that machines can be intelligent, or conscious, is as old as time. Understanding your personal politics on this point will help you frame your work, ways of thinking, and modes of communication with those who don’t share your view.
It is a personal categorization in viewing computer systems, the risk of automation, and the individual change, both of which ask of you. Any subjective progression is a matter of aesthetics; knowing yours will spare you from going in circles.
Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
LISP is one of the earliest high-level programming languages, designed for symbolic reasoning and AI through its simple, flexible, parenthesis-based syntax.
I recommend On Intelligence for more on this point.