192 μ£¥³¤ ¬μμ¬KENNETH CUKIER is Senior Editor at The
Economist and a co-author of Big Data: A
Revolution That Will Transform How We Live,
Work, and Think.Ready for Robots?
How to Think About the
Future o AIKenneth Cukier
Possible Minds: Twenty-£ve Ways of
Looking at AI
EDITED BY JOHN BROCKMAN.
Penguin Press, 2019, 320 pp.I
n 1955, John McCarthy coined the
term “artiÃcial intelligence” (¬) in a
grant proposal that he co-wrote with
his colleague Marvin Minsky and a group
o other computer scientists seeking
funding for a workshop they hoped to
hold at Dartmouth College the following
summer. Their choice o words set in
motion decades o semantic squabbles
(“Can machines think?”) and fueled
anxieties over malicious robots such as
©¬ ̈ 9000, the sentient computer in the
Ãlm 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the cyborg
assassin played by Arnold Schwarzeneg-
ger in The Terminator. I McCarthy and
Minsky had chosen a blander phrase—
say, “automaton studies”—the concept
might not have appealed as much to
Hollywood producers and journalists,
even as the technology developed apace.
But McCarthy and Minsky weren’t
thinking about the long term. They had a
much narrower motive for coming upwith a new phrase: they were reluctant
to invite Norbert Wiener to the program.
Wiener was one o the founders o the
nascent Ãeld, a child prodigy who had
graduated from college at age 14 and
received a Ph.D. in philosophy from
Harvard four years later. To describe his
work on how animals and machines
rely on feedback mechanisms for control
and communication, Wiener had chosen
to use the word “cybernetics,” a term that
derives from the ancient Greek word for
“helmsman.” He titled his 1948 book
Cybernetics, and after it became a surprise
bestseller, other researchers began
applying the term to their attempts to get
computers to process information
much in the way that a human brain does.
There was no question that Wiener
was brilliant. The trouble was that he
also happened to be a pugnacious
know-it-all who would have made the
summer at Dartmouth mÙserable. So
McCarthy and Minsky avoided Wiener’s
term, in part to make it easier to justify
shutting him out. They weren’t studying
cybernetics; they were studying artiÃ-
cial intelligence.
It wasn’t only Wiener’s personality
that was a problem. The Dartmouth
program was aimed at practitioners, and
Wiener’s work had in recent years taken
a more philosophical bent. Since the
publication o Cybernetics, Wiener had
begun to consider the social, political, and
ethical aspects o the technology, and he
had reached some dark conclusions. He
worried about Frankenstein monsters,
composed o vacuum tubes but endowed
with sophisticated logic, who might one
day turn on their creators. “The hour is very
late, and the choice o good and evil knocks
at our door,” he wrote in 1950. “We
must cease to kiss the whip that lashes us.”Return to Table of Contents