Yesterday’s tomorrow today: Turing, Searle and the contested significance of artificial intelligence

Abstract

In stating the problem is not new and in drawing attention to Turing and Searle as longstanding sources of key ideas I do not mean to suggest that the history of AI, computing, robotics, animatronics and automata begins with these two.Neologisms may be new but ideas far older.John McCarthy coined the term AI at a conference in 1956.There are 'robots' in the Iliad and actual animatronics of varying degrees of sophistication are scattered throughout history.See Adam Rutherford 'Rise of the Robots: The history of things to come' Radio 4 broadcast Monday 13th February 2017: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08crvz3 2 There are recognized limitations.The first report restricts itself to impacts for a typical American city based on 8 domains.It explicitly excludes military and security aspects of AI and assumes that the material presented will be relevant to different degrees on a global basis.2016: p. 12).However, this is not quite right.There are two basic conceptual focuses for AI and some confusion about how they relate.How something is conceived is usually more complex in its formation than how it is defined.Furthermore, what the conceptual focus emphasises has consequences for how a concept operates. 3 What I mean by this will become clearer as we progress.For our purposes, Searle introduces the relevant basic conceptual distinction for AI in his 'Minds, brains and programs,' (1980).His concern was the significance of AI for the study of the mind.For Searle, 'weak AI' concerns computers as a tool for the study of the human mind, whilst 'strong AI' assumes or asserts that a sufficiently complex computer is a mind.We will return to Searle later.The distinction, though still partly rooted in Searle's work, has generalised beyond a focus on philosophy of mind.Weak AI focuses primarily on AI as functions and strong AI as entities. Weak artificial intelligence (AI w )In contemporary usage the weak concept of artificial intelligence (AI w ) focuses on function and is on closer inspection semantically minimal and tautological.The Stanford report adopts Nils Nilsson's well-known definition and neatly encapsulates key aspects of AI w : Artificial Intelligence is that activity devoted to making machines intelligent and intelligence is that quality that enables an entity to function appropriately and with foresight in its environment [...According to this view] the difference between an arithmetic calculator and a human brain is not one of kind, but of scale, speed, degree of autonomy and generality [ There is a] intelligence spectrum [ and] the characterization of intelligence as a spectrum grants no special status to the human brain.But to date human intelligence has no match in the biological and artificial worlds for sheer versatility, with the abilities to reason, achieve goals, understand and generate language, perceive and respond to sensory inputs, prove mathematical theorems, play challenging games, synthesize and summarize information, create art and music and even write histories [ But for AI] matching any human ability is only a sufficient condition, not a necessary one.(Stone, 2016: p. 12) It should be emphasised that AI w is a default position, and often a placeholder.The Stanford report, like many others, attempts to leave open exactly what AI might be and become.New reports are to be commissioned by a Standing Committee for the Stanford project every 5 years.The first report was produced by a selected Study Panel, mainly comprised of experts in robotics, programming, data analysis, systems theory and planning, and economics (drawn from Microsoft, MIT, Harvard etc).The default to AI w reflects the lack of agreement and coherency across these fields.This lack, awkward though it seems, is not empty for the purposes of how something is 3 To be clear, as an exercise in analytical philosophy, one could formally distinguish definition, concept and conceptual focus.In what follows I do not elaborate significantly regarding distinct