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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
There have been naysayers from the erliest days of artificial intelligence. Alan Turing anticipated (and dealt with) some of their objections in his 1950 paper. In this chapter, I'll recount some of the controversies surrounding AI – including some not foreseen by Turing. I'll also describe some formidable technical difficulties confronting the field. By the mid-1980s or so, these difficulties had caused some to be rather dismissive about progress up to that time and pessimistic about the possibility of further progress. For example, in wondering about the need for a special issue of the journal Dœdalus devoted to AI in 1988, the philosopher Hilary Putnam wrote “What's all the fuss about now? Why a whole issue of Dœdalus? Why don't we wait until AI achieves something and then have an issue?”
The attacks and expressions of disappointment from outside the field helped precipitate what some have called an “AI winter.”
Opinions from Various Onlookers
The Mind Is Not a Machine
In the introduction to his edited volume of essays titled Minds and Machines, the philosopher Alan Ross Anderson mentions the following two extreme opinions regarding whether or not the mind is a machine:
(1) We might say that human beings are merely very elaborate bits of clockwork, and that our having “minds” is simply a consequence of the fact that the clockwork is very elaborate, or
(2) we might say that any machine is merely a product of human ingenuity (in principle nothing more than a shovel), and that though we have minds, we cannot impart that peculiar feature of ours to anything except our offspring: no machine can acquire this uniquely human characteristic.
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