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HISTORY of ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Slightly Before Homer Was Codifying What Were Surely Already Ancient Tradi• P field must know from personal experience, represent a tradition as ancient as the urge to create artificial intelligences. HISTORY OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Slightly before Homer was codifying what were surely already ancient tradi• P. McCorduck (Session Chairman), Univ. of tions, another set of codes was brought Pittsburgh! M. Minsky, MIT: 0. Selfridge, down from Mt. Sinai by an unwilling pro• Bolt Beranek and Newman? H. A. Simon, phet named Moses. We know these codes as Carnegie-Mellon University the Ten Commandments, and it's the sec• ond one which is germane here: "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image or The Early History any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above or that is in the earth P. McCorduck beneath, or that is in the water under the earthj Thou shalt not bow down thyself to Though our discussion is entitled "The them nor serve them, for I the Lord thy History of Artificial Intelligence", in God am a jealous God..." fact we are focusing here on one brief but highly significant moment in that Indeed. No matter that the Lawgiver history, the moment when art metamor• promptly violates that very commandment phosed itself into science, from wish and in the instructions for building the Ark dream to something like reality. As you of the Covenant; the message is clear. will learn from each of the discussants, If you dabble in that sort of thing, you this metamorphosis took place at several violate the territory of gods, and we all locations during the early to mid-1950s, know who rushes in where angels fear to and its catalyst was the recognition that tread. the computer was the most promising med• ium yet in which to realize what had been I like to think of these two attitudes a human dream since earliest times, the as the Hellenic and the Hebraic. The creation of man-made, rather than begotten Hellenic is curious, enthusiastic (a word intelligence. which itself means filled with the breath of the divine) and generally at ease with Let me remind you of some of the first the idea of artificial intelligence. The manifestations of that dream. A great Hebraic, on the contrary, holds that the many artificial intelligences, or automa• idea of artificial intelligence is fraud• ta, appear in Greek mythology, put to• ulent, wicked, and even blasphemous. gether to be useful or to carry out some task that the gods themselves find burden• This is an arbitrary distinction when it some. comes to the actual business of doing ar• tificial intelligence. Past and present, Around 850 B.C., Homer tells us about there are devout Jews and Christians un• poor old ugly Hephaestus, the god of fire troubled by the idea. For example, among and the divine smith, who, because he is the ardent Christians in the past who fig• crippled, has to fashion attendants to ure in this history is Ramon Lull, a 13th help him walk and assist him in his forgei century Spanish mystic who renounced the dissolute ways of his youth and went off These are golden, and in appearance to convert the Muslims (Cohen, 1966). It like living young women. isn't recorded that he had much effect on There is intelligence in their hearts, them, but they had a profound effect on and there is speech in them him: they introduced him to an Arabic and strength, and from the immortal thinking machine called a zairja. and he gods they have learned how to do rushed back to Christendom with the idea things. of constructing a thinking machine of his own called, more grandly, the Ars Magna. From the immortal gods they have learned (This translates to The Great Work of Art; how to do things. There's a phrase so Lull was right at home in a field not fraught with implications it takes your known for its humility.) The aim of the breath away. For humans to behave like Ars Magna was to bring reason to bear on gods--because godlike it is to imbue the all subjects, and thereby arrive at truth inanimate with animation--is hubris in• without the trouble of thinking. Be that deed, and no opponent of artificial in• as it may, Lull's scheme seems to me re• telligence has failed to express shock at markable not for its grandiose claims, the blasphemous behavior of humans who but because without hesitation it presup• aspire to divinity. posed that human thought could be mechan• ized. These opponents themselves, persistent and articulate as nearly everyone in the Invited Panel-2: McCorduck 951 Other well-known Christians were said different territory. In that case, first to own brazen heads, that is, automata prize goes to Charles Babbage and his they had made themselves which were not colleague the Countess Lovelace. only proof of their wisdom in being able to construct such things, but which then In 1843, Lady Lovelace published a long went on as consultants to amplify the and detailed description of Babbage's wisdom of their creators. My favorite Analytical Engine, and contrary to the story is about the brazen head Albertus implications of her widely quoted remark Magnus was said to own. "A lovely woman that machines can do only what we tell who could speak," says one source, and them to do, she added that the question she so offended Albertus's pupil, the of whether such an engine could be said young Thomas Aquinas, that he burned it to think would have to remain open until upon the death of his teacher (von Boehn, they actually constructed one and tried undated). What on earth did she say? it out (Morrison and Morrison, 1961). Alas, the story loses some of its pi• quancy with the fact that Albertus out• In any event, Babbage and Lady Lovelace lived his celebrated pupil by some six considered building a quick chess machine years. in order to finance the building of the larger Analytical Engine, and were only The story of Rabbi Loew of Prague and dissuaded when they discovered that Tom his creation Joseph Golem is so familiar Thumb was what the public was willing to that it'8 hardly worth repeating: I mere• pay to see, and not an automatic chess ly want to remind you that the legend machine. exists, and is all the more charming for the fact that several of the scientists Later on, in 1915, two chess machines associated with cybernetics and artificial which played the endgame were constructed intelligence have family traditions that by Leonardo Torres y Quevedo, a gifted trace their genealogy back to the Rabbi. Spanish inventor. While he declined to claim that his automata were actually In short, my division between the Hel• thinking, he suggested that we'd better lenic, or positive, or progressive, or refine our definitions of that process, irresponsible attitude (depending on your and that his automata could certainly do inclination) and the Hebraic, or negative, many things which were popularly classi• or backward, or responsible attitude fied as thinking (Randell, 1973). (again, depending on your inclination) is merely a convenient way of illustrating But the most passionate champion of that the two attitudes have coexisted machine intelligence was a man of breath• with equal duration and intensity, which taking intelligence himself, Alan Turing. show no sign of abating. An intelligent machine might only be im• plicit in his famous proposal of the In imaginative literature, the Hebraic Turing machine in 1937, but nobody was attitude seems usually to have prevailed. more eager than he to make those impli• Dr. Frankenstein found out to his cha• cations explicit. He endured a lot of grin what creating an artificial intelli• condescending derision for his dream, but gence will get you, though the real story he continued to pursue it, though the ar• is more complicated than that, as are the chives give the impression that except issues. Later writers have been mostly for one year, he was never able to pursue pessimistic for the future of the human it as more than a serious hobby. race side by side with artificial in• telligences, by definition smarter, fas• At the same time that Turing was at ter, and immune to human frailties. I work, there was on the opposite side of don't know whether I count as pessimistic enemy lines--this was by now World War or optimistic Asimov's final story in II--a young engineer who had built the his robot series, which gives us a pater• world's first up-and-running digital nalistic intelligence doing things for computer, installed in his parents' Berlin our own good and even making us like that parlor. His name was Konrad Zuse, and state of affairs (Asimov, 1950). he too was fascinated by the notion of intelligent machines. The possibilities You may begin to suspect that until the of his machine's intelligence were clear early 1950s, all the media in which arti• in his mind: by 1943 he was wondering ficial intelligences appear belonged to whether it could play a master in chess, the realm of make-believei legend, fan• and by 1945 he had developed a program• tasy, novel, play. If you classify sci• ming language called the Plankalkul entific speculation as fantasy, this is which, he felt certain, could be used not probably true, but if by scientific spec• only for mathematical problem solving but ulation we mean not only a dream to be also for programming artificial intelli• pursued but a possible means by which it gence problems of many kinds, though he can be accomplished, then we are in believed that real artificial intelligence Invited Panel-2: McCorduck 952 was one or two generations away.
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