Abstract
It has been just over 100 years since the birth of Alan Turing and more than 65 years since he published in Mind his seminal paper, Computing Machinery and Intelligence (Turing in Computing machinery and intelligence. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1950). In the Mind paper, Turing asked a number of questions, including whether computers could ever be said to have the power of “thinking” (“I propose to consider the question, Can computers think?” ...Alan Turing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Mind, 1950). Turing also set up a number of criteria—including his imitation game—under which a human could judge whether a computer could be said to be “intelligent”. Turing’s paper, as well as his important mathematical and computational insights of the 1930s and 1940s led to his popular acclaim as the “Father of Artificial Intelligence”. In the years since his paper was published, however, no computational system has fully satisfied Turing’s challenge. In this paper we focus on a different question, ignored in, but inspired by Turing’s work: How might the Artificial Intelligence practitioner implement “intelligence” on a computational device? Over the past 60 years, although the AI community has not produced a general-purpose computational intelligence, it has constructed a large number of important artifacts, as well as taken several philosophical stances able to shed light on the nature and implementation of intelligence. This paper contends that the construction of any human artifact includes an implicit epistemic stance. In AI this stance is found in commitments to particular knowledge representations and search strategies that lead to a product’s successes as well as its limitations. Finally, we suggest that computational and human intelligence are two different natural kinds, in the philosophical sense, and elaborate on this point in the conclusion.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Bartlett F (1932) Remembering. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Bayes T (1763) Essay towards solving a problem in the doctrine of chances. Philos Trans R Soc Lond 370–418
Blackburn S (2008) The Oxford dictionary of philosophy, 15th edn. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Brooks RA (1989) A robot that walks: emergent behaviors from a carefully evolved network. Neural Comput 1(2):253–262
Brooks RA (1991) Intelligence without representation. In: Kaufmann M (ed) International joint conference on artificial intelligence, MIT Press, Cambridge, pp 596–575
Buchanan BG, Shortliffe EH (eds) (1984) Rule-based expert systems: the MYCIN experiments of the stanford heuristic programming project. Addison-Wesley, Reading
Chakrabarti C (2014) Artificial conversations for chatter bots using knowledge representation, learning, and pragmatics. Ph.D. thesis, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM
Chakrabarti C, Luger G (2014) An anatomy for artificial conversation generation in the customer service domain. In: 25th modern artificial intelligence and cognitive science conference, pp 80–85
Chakrabarti C, Luger GF (2015) Artificial conversations for customer service chatter bots: architecture, algorithms, and evaluation metrics. Expert Syst Appl 42(20):6878–6897
Chakrabarti C, Pless DJ, Rammohan RR, Luger GF (2007) Diagnosis using a first-order stochastic language that learns. Expert Syst Appl 32(3):832–840
Chakrabarti C, Rammohan RR, Luger GF (2005) A first-order stochastic modeling language for diagnosis. In: Press A (ed) Proceedings of the 18th international Florida artificial intelligence research society conference, AAAI Press, Menlo Park, CA
Chakrabarti C, Rammohan RR, Luger GF (2005) A first-order stochastic prognostic system for the diagnosis of helicopter rotor systems for the US navy. In: Press E (ed) Second Indian international conference on artificial intelligence, Pune, India
Chomsky N (1957) Syntactic structures. Mouton, The Hague
Church A (1936) An unsolvable problem of elementary number theory. Am J Math 58(2):345–363
Clark A (2008) Supersizing the mind: embodiment, action, and cognitive extension. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Collins A, Quillian MR (1969) Retreival time from semantic memory. J Verbal Learn Verbal Behav 8:240–247
Copeland BJ (2015) The Church-Turing. Thesis
Demptster AP (1968) A generalization of bayesian inference. J Roy Stat Soc 30(Series B):1–38
Descartes R (1996/1680) Meditations on First Philosophy (trans: Cottingham J). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Dewey J (1916) Democracy and education. Macmillan, New York
Dreyfus H (1979) What computers still can’t do. MIT Press, Cambridge
Dreyfus H (2002) Intelligence without representation—Merleau–Ponty’s critique of mental representation the relevance of phenomenology to scientific explanation. Phenomenol Cogn Sci 1:367–383
Epstein R, Roberts G, Poland G (eds) (2008) Parsing the turing test: philosophical and methodological issues in the quest for the thinking computer. Springer, Dordrecht
Ferrucci D (2012) Introduction to “this is watson”. IBM J Res Dev 56(3–4):1–15
Fikes RE, Nilsson NJ (1971) Strips: a new approach to the application of theorem proving to artificial intelligence. Artif Intell 1(2):227–232
Glymour C (2001) The mind’s arrows: bayes nets and graphical causal models in psychology. MIT Press, New York
Gopnik A (2011) Probabilistic models as theories of children’s minds. Behav Brain Sci 34(4):200–201
Gopnik A (2011) A unified account of abstract structure and conceptual change. Probabilistic models and early learning mechanisms. Commentary on Susan Carey, “the origin of concepts”. Behav Brain Sci 34(3):126–129
Gopnik A, Glymour C, Sobel DM, Schulz LE, Kushnir T, Danks D (2004) A theory of causal learning in children: causal maps and bayes nets. Psychol Rev 111(1):3–32
Grice P (1975) Logic and conversation. Syntax Semant 3:41–58
Harmon P, King D (1985) Expert systems: artificial intelligence in business. Wiley, London
Hebb DO (1949) The organization of behavior. Wiley, London
Hobbes T (2010/1651) Leviathan. Revised Edition. In: Martinich AP, Battiste B (eds) Broadview Press, Peterborough, ON
Hopfield JJ (1984) Neural networks and physical systems with emergent collective computational abilities. Proc Natl Acad Sci 79:2554–2558
James W (1981) Pragmatism. Hackett, London
James W (2002) The varieties of religious experience. Longmans, Green, and Co, UK
Jurafsky D, Martin JH (2008) Speech and language processing, 2nd edn. Pearson Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ
Kant I (1781) Immanuel Kant’s critique of pure reason. St. Martin’s Press, New York
Klein WB, Westervelt RT, Luger GF (1999) A general purpose intelligent control system for particle accelerators. J Intell Fuzzy Syst 7(1):1–12
Kolodner JL (1993) Case-based reasoning. Morgan Kaufmann, Los Altos
Kowalski R (1979) Logic for problem solving. North-Holland, Amsterdam
Kushnir T, Gopnik A, Lucas C, Schulz L (2010) Inferring hidden causal structure. Cogn Sci 34:148–160
Luger GF (2009) Artificial intelligence: structures and strategies for complex problem solving, 6th edn. Addison-Wesley, Reading
Masterman M (1961) Semantic message detection for machine translation, using interlingua. In: Proceedings of the 1961 international conference on machine translation
McCarthy J (1968) Programs with common sense. MIT Press, Cambridge
McCarthy J (1980) Circumscription, a form of non-monotonic reasoning. Artif Intell 12:27–39
McCarthy J (1986) Applications of circumscription to formalizing common-sense knowledge. Artif Intell 28:89–116
McCarthy J, Hayes P (1969) Some philosophical problems from the standpoint of artificial intelligence. The University Press, UK
McCulloch WS, Pitts W (1943) A logical calculus of the ideas immanent in nervous activity. Bull Math Biophys 5:115–133
Merleau-Ponty M (1962) Phenomenology of perception. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London
Miller G (1956) The magical number seven plus or minus two: some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychol Rev 63(2):81–97
Miller GA (2003) The cognitive revolution: a historical perspective. Trends Cogn Sci 7:141–144
Minsky M (1986) The society of mind. Simon and Schuster, New York
Newell A, Simon H (1972) Human problem solving. Prentice Hall, Prentice
Newell A, Simon H (1976) Computer science as empirical enquiry: symbols and search. Commun ACM 19(3):113–126
Pearl J (1988) Probabilistic reasoning in intelligent systems: networks of plausible inference. Morgan Kaufmann, Los Altos
Pearl J (2000) Causality. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Peirce CS (1958) Collected papers 1931–1958. Harvard University Press, Cambridge
Piaget J (1954) The construction of reality in the child. Basic Books, London
Piaget J (1970) Structuralism. Basic Books, London
Pinker S, Bloom P (1990) Natural language and natural selection. Behav Brain Sci 13:707–784
Post E (1943) Formal reductions of the general combinatorial problem. Am J Math 65:197–268
Quillian MR (1967) Word concepts: a theory and simulation of some basic semantic capabilities. Morgan Kaufmann, Los Altos
Rammohan RR (2010) Three algorithms for causal learning. Ph.D. thesis, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM
Rosenbloom PS, Lehman JF, Laird JE (1993) Overview of soar as a unified theory of cognition. In: Erlbaum (ed) Proceedings of the fifteenth annual conference of the cognitive science society
Ryle G (2002) The concept of mind. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Sakhanenko NA, Luger GF, Stern CR (2006) Managing dynamic contexts using failure-driven stochastic models. In: Press A (ed) Proceedings of the FLAIRS conference
Sakhanenko NA, Rammohan RR, Luger GF, Stern CR (2008) A new approach to model-based diagnosis using probabilistic logic. In: Press A (ed) Proceedings of the 21st FLAIRS conference
Schank RC, Colby KM (1975) Computer models of thought and language. Freeman, San Francisco
Searle J (1969) Speech acts. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Searle J (1975) Indirect speech acts, chap. 3. Speech acts. Academic Press, New York, pp 59–82
Simon H (1981) The sciences of the artificial. MIT Press, London
Sowa JF (1984) Conceptual structures: information processing in mind and machine. Addison-Wesley, Reading
Sun R (ed) (2008) The Cambridge handbook of computational psychology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Turing A (1936) On computable numbers with an application to the entscheidungsproblem. Lond Math Soci 2(42):230–265
Turing A (1950) Computing machinery and intelligence. Oxford University Press, Oxford
VandenBos GR (ed) (2007) APA dictionary of psychology, 1st edn. American Psychological Association, Washington
von Glaserfeld E (1978) An introduction to radical constructivism. In: Watzlawick P (ed) The Invented Reality, pp 17–40. Norton, New York
Wilks Y (1972) Grammar, meaning, and the machine analysis of language. Routledge and Kagen Paul, London
Williams BC, Nayak PP (1996) A model-based approach to reactive self-reconfiguring systems. In: Press M (ed) Proceedings of the AAAI-96, MIT Press, Cambridge, pp 971–978
Williams BC, Nayak, PP (1997) A reactive planner for a model-based executive. In: Press M (ed) Proceedings of IJCAI-97
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Luger, G.F., Chakrabarti, C. From Alan Turing to modern AI: practical solutions and an implicit epistemic stance. AI & Soc 32, 321–338 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-016-0646-7
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-016-0646-7