Understanding the Artificial: On the Future Shape of Artificial Intelligence

167 Pages·1991·4.93 MB·English

by  Massimo Negrotti (auth.)

Understanding the Artificial:
On the Future Shape of Artificial Intelligence
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND SOCIETY
Series Editor: KARAMJIT S. GILL
Knowledge, Skill and Artificial Intelligence
Bo Goranzon and Ingela Josefson (Eds.)
Artificial Intelligence, Culture and Language: On Education and
Work
Bo Goranzon and Magnus Florin (Eds.)
Designing Human-centred Technology: A Cross-disciplinary
Project in Computer-aided Manufacturing
H.H. Rosenbrock (Ed.)
The Shape of Future Technology: The Anthropocentric Alternative
Peter Brodner
Crossing the Border: The Social and Engineering Design of Compu
ter Integrated Manufacturing Systems
J. Martin Corbett, Lauge Baungaard Rasmussen and Felix Rauner
Artificial Intelligence and Human Institutions
Richard Ennals
Dialogue and Technology: Art and Knowledge
Bo Goranzon and Magnus Florin (Eds.)
Massimo Negrotti (Ed.)
Understanding the
Artificial: On the
Future Shape of
Artificial Intelligence
With 13 Figures
Springer-Verlag
London Berlin Heidelberg New York
Paris Tokyo Hong Kong
Massimo Negrotti
Universita 'Degli Studi di Urbino,
Istituto Metodologico Economico Statistico (IMES),
Via Saffi 15,
61029 Urbino (PS), Italy
ISBN -13 :978-3-540-19612-9 e-ISBN -13 :978-1-4471-1776-6
DOl: 10.10071978-1-4471-1776-6
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Understanding the artificial: on the future shape of artificial intelligence. - (Artificial
intelligence and society).
1. Artificial intelligence
1. Negrotti, Massimo 1944- Series
006.3
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Negrotti, Massimo, 1944-
Understanding the artificial: on the future shape of artificial intelligencelMassimo
Negrotti.
p. cm. - (Artificial intelligence and society)
Includes index.
ISBN -13:978-3-540-19612-9
1. Artificial intelligence. I. Title. II. Series. III. Series: Artificial intelligence and
society.
Q335.N4351991 90-21519
006.3-dc20 CIP
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or
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3413830-543210 (printed on acid-free paper)
To Professor Angelo Scivoletto
Preface
In recent years a vast literature has been produced on the feasibility
of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The topic most frequently discussed is
the concept of intelligence, with efforts to demonstrate that it is or is
not transferable to the computer. Only rarely has attention been
focused on the concept of the artificial per se in order to clarify what
kind, depth and scope of performance (including intelligence) it
could support. Apart from the classic book by H.A. Simon, The
Sciences of the Artificial, published in 1969, no serious attempt has
been made to define a conceptual frame for understanding the
intimate nature of intelligent machines independently of its claimed
or denied human-like features.
The general aim of this book is to discuss, from different points of
view, what we are losing and what we are gaining from the artificial,
particularly from AI, when we abandon the original
anthropomorphic pretension. There is necessarily a need for
analysis of the history of AI and the limits of its plausibility in
reproducing the human mind. In addition, the papers presented
here aim at redefining the epistemology and the possible targets of
the AI discipline, raising problems, and proposing solutions, which
should be understood as typical of the artificial rather than of an
information-based conception of man.
The result, I hope, could be initiation of a new wave of debate
which, assuming that the critiques generated by the first one were
fundamentally right, might help human culture to adapt itself to the
artificial rather than to assimilate it according to a pure and
dangerous user-oriented philosophy.
Urbino Massimo Negrotti
August 1990
Acknowledgement
The editor is grateful to David Smith for his help in editing the
material in this book into its final form.
Contents
List of Contributors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... . . . . . . . . xi
1. Introduction: Artificial Intelligence: Its Future and its
Cultural Roots
Massimo Negrotti ............................................................ 1
2. The Cognitive Dimension in the Processing of Natural
Language
Mario Borillo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
3. Making a Mind Versus Modelling the Brain: Artificial
Intelligence Back at the Branchpoint
Hubert L. Dreyfus and Stuart E. Dreyfus ................................ 33
4. Alternative Intelligence
Massimo Negrotti ..... ..................... ...... ............................ 55
5. Artificial Intelligence as a Dialectic of Science and
Technology
Ephraim Nissan.......... .......... ........................................... 77
6. Biological and Artificial Intelligence
Alberto Oliverio............................................................... 91
7. Computers, Musical Notation and the Externalisation of
Knowledge: Towards a Comparative Study in the History of
Information Technology
Henrik Sinding-Larsen ...................................................... 101
8. Cognitive Science and the Computer Metaphor
John R. Searle................................................................. 127
9. Intelligent Behaviour in Machines
Luigi Stringa . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . .. . . . . . . . . .. . . . 139
x Contents
10. Conclusions: The Dissymmetry of Mind and the Role of
the Artificial
Massimo Negrotti ............. ............. .................................. 149
Appendix A: One Hundred Definitions of AI
Massimo Negrotti ............................................................ 155
Appendix B: An Attempt at Getting a Basis for a Rational
Definition of the Artificial
Massimo Negrotti ............................................................ 159
Subject Index............................................................... 161
Contributors
Mario Borillo
Dr, Research Director, CNRS, Institut de Recherche au Informati
que de Toulouse, Laboratoire Langages et Systemes Informatiques,
Universite Paul Saba tier, 118 Route de Narbonne, 31062 Toulouse
Cedex, France
Hubert L. Dreyfus
Professor, Department of Philosophy, Univeristy of California,
Berkeley, CA 94720, USA
Stuart E. Dreyfus
Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering, University of
California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA
Massimo Negrotti
Professor, Director, Istituto Metodologico Economico Statistico
(IMES), University of Urbino, Via Saffi IS, 1-61029 Urbino (PS), Italy
Ephraim Nissan
Professor, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Ben
Gurion University of the Negev, PO Box 653, 84105 Beer-Sheva,
Israel
Alberto Oliverio
Professor, CNR Institute of Psychobiology and Psychopharmacol
ogy, University of Rome, Via Reno I, 00198 Rome, Italy
Henrik Sinding-Larsen
Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo, PO Box
1091 Blindern, N-0317 Oslo 3, Norway
John R. Searle
Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of California,
Berkeley, CA 94720, USA
Luigi Stringa
Professor, Director of the Institute of Scientific and Technological
Research (IRST) , University of Trento, Loc. Pante, 38050 Povo,
Trento, Italy
Chapter 1
Introduction: Artificial Intelligence: Its Future
and its Cultural Roots
Massimo Negrotti
The Need to Understand the Artificial
The history of the human species has involved a continual process of
adaptation to the physical dimensions and fluctuations of the natural environ
ment. Their success in this respect has been achieved not only through an
ancient biological and non-intentional evolutionary process but also through
intentional efforts aimed at building devices able to provide useful tools for
survival. Science and technology are, simultaneously, the main causes and
effects of these efforts, and the concrete result of their advances is summed up
in the concept of "The Technological Environment". In other words, in order to
adapt themselves to the external environment, humans have built up a new
one and now they have to deal with two distinct, though interrelated, spaces of
fluctuating dimensions, each with its own problems of adaptation, namely the
natural and artificial environments.
In addition, we have begun very recently, due to natural and unpredictable
adjustments or abnormal events, to investigate the relations between the
technological environment and the natural one. But while we know enough to
be able to build particular classes (or "species", in Butler's terms) of
technological devices very effectively indeed, we lack a body of organised
knowledge about the whole technological system we have built up around us
(and in some cases even within us). On the one hand we know almost all the
rules (for instance the physical rules) for designing and building different
machines but we lack any systematic knowledge on the relations among them
and, furthermore, between them and humans. Whatever we call it: "Tech
nological Environment" (Negrotti 1975) or "Cybernetic Society" (Arbib 1984),
the new environment seems to be largely unknown in concrete terms.
Generally speaking, we lack well-founded knowledge of the sorts of general
interfaces we have built between ourselves and the natural environment.
Specialist doctrines, such as the so-called "general systems theory", "systems