1956 and the Origins of Artificial Intelligence Computing
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UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Previously Published Works Title Building the Second Mind: 1956 and the Origins of Artificial Intelligence Computing Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/88q1j6z3 ISBN 9781476357638 Author Skinner, Rebecca Elizabeth Publication Date 2012-05-01 eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Building the Second Mind: 1956 and the Origins of Artificial Intelligence Computing Rebecca E. Skinner copyright 2012 by Rebecca E. Skinner ISBN 978-0-9894543-1-5 Building the Second Mind: 1956 and the Origins of Artificial Intelligence Computing Chapter .5. Preface Chapter 1. Introduction Chapter 2. The Ether of Ideas in the Thirties and the War Years Chapter 3. The New World and the New Generation in the Forties Chapter 4. The Practice of Physical Automata Chapter 5. Von Neumann, Turing, and Abstract Automata Chapter 6. Chess, Checkers, and Games Chapter 7. The Impasse at End of Cybernetic Interlude Chapter 8. Newell, Shaw, and Simon at the Rand Corporation Chapter 9. The Declaration of AI at the Dartmouth Conference Chapter 10. The Inexorable Path of Newell and Simon Chapter 11. McCarthy and Minsky begin Research at MIT Chapter 12. AI’s Detractors Before its Time Chapter 13. Conclusion: Another Pregnant Pause Chapter 14. Acknowledgements Chapter 15. Bibliography Chapter 16. Endnotes Chapter .5. Preface Introduction Building the Second Mind: 1956 and the Origins of Artificial Intelligence Computing is a history of the origins of AI. AI, the field that seeks to do things that would be considered intelligent if a human being did them, is a universal of human thought, developed over centuries. Various efforts to carry this out appear- in the forms of robotic machinery and more abstract tools and systems of symbols intended to artificially contrive knowledge. The latter sounds like alchemy, and in a sense it certainly is. There is no gold more precious than knowledge. That this is a constant historical dream, deeply rooted in the human experience, is not in doubt. However, it was not more than a dream until the machinery that could put it into effect was relatively cheap, robust, and available for ongoing experimentation. The digital computer was invented during the years leading to and including the Second World War, and AI became a tangible possibility. Software that used symbols to enact the steps of problem-solving could be designed and executed. However, envisioning our possibilities when they are in front of us is often a more formidable challenge than bringing about their material reality. AI in the general sense of intelligence cultivated through computing had also been discussed with increasing confidence through the early 1950s. As we will see, bringing it into reality as a concept took repeated hints, fits, and starts until it finally appeared as such in 1956. Our story is an intellectual saga with several supporting leads, a large peripheral cast, and the giant sweep of Postwar history in the backdrop. There is no single ‘great man’ in this opus. As far as the foundation of AI is concerned, all of the founders were great. Even the peripheral cast was composed of people who were major figures in other fields. Nor, frankly, is there a villain either. Themes and Thesis The book tells the story of the development of the cognitive approach to psychology, computer science (software), and the development of software that undertook to do ‘intelligent’ things during mid-century. To this end, I study the early development of computing and psychology in the middle decades of the century, ideas about ‘Giant Brains’, and the formation of the field of study known as AI. Why did this particular culture spring out of this petri dish, at this time? In addition to ‘why’, I consider the accompanying where, how, and who. This work is expository: I am concerned with the enrichment of the historical record. Notwithstanding the focus on the story, the author of necessity participates in the thematic concerns of historians of computer science. Several themes draw our attention. The role of the military in the initial birth and later development of the computer and its ancillary technologies should not be erased, eroded, or diminished. Make no mistake: war is abhorrent. But sustained nation-building and military drives can yield staggering technological advances. War is a powerful driver of technological innovations (1). This is particularly the case with the development of ‘general-purpose technologies’, that is, those which present an entirely new way of processing material or information (2). These technologies of necessity create and destroy new industries, means of locomotion, creation of energy, and processing of information (steel rather than iron, the book, the electric generator, the automobile, the digital computer). In the process, these fundamental technologies will bring about new forms of communication, cultural activities, and numerous ancillary industries. We repeat, for effect: AI is the progeny of the Second World War, as is the digital computer, the microwave oven, the transistor radio and portable music devices, desktop and laptop computers, cellular telephones, the iPod, iPad, computer graphics, and thousands of software applications. The theory of the Cold War’s creative power and fell hand in shaping the Computer Revolution is prevalent in the current academic discourse on this topic: its paradoxical creative power can’t be denied (3). The role of the Counterculture in creating the Computer Revolution is affectively appealing. In its strongest form, this theory holds that revolutionary hackers created most, if not all of the astonishing inventions in computer applications (4). For many of the computer applications of the Sixties and Seventies, including games, software systems, security and vision, this theory holds a good deal of force. However, the period under discussion in this book refutes the larger statement, though. The thesis has its chronology backwards. The appearance of the culturally revolutionary ‘t-shirts’ was preceded by a decade and a half of hardware, systems and software language work by the culturally conservative ‘white-shirts’. (Throughout the Fifties, IBM insisted on a dress code of white shirts, worn by white Protestant men) (5). Yet there is one way in which those who lean heavily on the cultural aspect of the Computer Revolution are absolutely correct. An appropriate and encouraging organizational culture was also essential in the development of the computer in every aspect, along the course of the entire chronology. This study emphasizes more emphatically the odd mélange of a number of different institutional contexts in computing, and how they came together to study one general endeavor. AI in its origins started with individual insights and projects, rather than cultivated in any single research laboratory. The establishment of AI preceded its social construction. We could say that AI’s initial phase as revolutionary science (or exogenous shock, in the economist’s terms) preceded its institutionalization and establishment of an overall “ecology of knowledge” (6). However, once AI was started, it too relied heavily on its institutional settings. In turn, the founders of AI established and cultivated research environments that would continue to foster innovation. The cultivation of such an environment is more evident in the later history of AI, rather than in the tentative movements in the 1950s. Yet another salient theme of this work is the sheer audacity of the paradigm transition that AI itself entailed. The larger manner of thinking about intelligence as a highly tangible quality, and about thinking as something that could have qualitative aspects to it, required a vast change between the late 1930s and the mid- 1950s. As with any such alteration of focus, this required the new agenda to be made visible- and envisioned while it still seemed like an extreme and far-fetched concept (7). A final theme is the larger role of AI in the history of the Twentieth century. It is certainly true that the Cold War’s scientific and research environment was a ‘Closed World’ in which an intense, intellectually charged, politically obsessive culture thrived. The stakes involved in the Cold War itself were the highest possible ones; the intensity of its inner circles this is no surprise. However, in this case, the larger cultural themes of the Twentieth century had created their own “closed world”. Between them, Marxian political philosophy and Freudian influence on culture had robbed the arts, politics and literature of its vitality. This elite literary ‘Closed world’ saw science and technology as aesthetically unappealing and inevitably hijacked by the political forces that funded research. The resolution of the Cold War, and the transformation of the economy and ultimately of culture by the popularization of computing, would not take place for decades. Yet the overcoming of the cultural impasse of the Twentieth century would be a long-latent theme in which AI and computing would later play a part (8). Outline of the Text In Building the Second Mind: 1956 and the Origins of Artificial Intelligence Computing , we examine the way in which AI was formed at its start, its originators, the world they lived in and how they chose this unique path, the computers that they used and the larger cultural beliefs about those machines, and the context in which they managed to find both the will and the way to achieve this. 1956 was the tipping point, rather than the turning point, for this entry into an alternative way of seeing the world. Our chapter outline indicates the line the book follows. The chapter outline delineates the book’s course. The Introduction and Conclusion chapters frame the book and discuss history outside of the time frame covered in BTSM, and establishes AI as a constant in world intellectual history (Chapter One). The other chapters are narrative, historical, and written within the context of their time.