Tag: Leibniz

AI before AI: Prehistory of Artificial Minds

Posted on by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad

by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad

Source: The Turk: The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine. New York: Walker. via Wikipedia

Artificial intelligence is generally conceptualized as a new technology which goes back only decades. In the popular imagination, at best we stretch it back to the Dartmouth Conference in 1956 or perhaps the birth of the Artificial Neurons a decade prior. Yet the impulse to imagine, build, and even worry over artificial minds has a long history. Long before they could build one, civilizations across the world built automata, thought about machines that could mimicked intelligence, and thought about the philosophical consequences of artificial thought. One can even think of AI as an old technology. That does not mean that we deny its current novelty but rather we recognize its deep roots in global history. One of the earliest speculations on machines that act like people. In Homer’s Iliad, the god Hephaestus fashions golden attendants who walk, speak, and assist him at his forge. Heron of Alexandria, working in the first century CE, designed elaborate automata that were far ahead of their time: self-moving theaters, coin-operated dispensers, and hydraulic birds.

Aristotle even speculated that if tools could work by themselves, masters would have no need of slaves. In the medieval Islamic world, the Musa brothers’ Book of Ingenious Devices (9th century) described the first programmable machines. Two centuries later, al-Jazari built water clocks, mechanical musicians, and even a programmed automaton boat, where pegs on a rotating drum controlled the rhythm of drummers and flautists.  In ancient China we observe one of the oldest legends of mechanical beings, the Liezi (3rd century BCE) recounts how the artificer Yan Shi presented a King with a humanoid automaton capable of singing and moving.  Later, in the 11th century, Su Song built an enormous astronomical clock tower with mechanical figurines that chimed the hours. In Japan, karakuri ningyo, intricate mechanical dolls of the 17th–19th centuries, were able to perform tea-serving, archery, and stage dramas. In short, the phenomenon of precursors of AI are observed globally. Read more »

Monday, February 8, 2021

How Things Hang Together: the Lobster and the Octopus Redux

Posted on by Jochen Szangolies

by Jochen Szangolies

This is the fourth part of a series on dual-process psychology and its significance for our image of the world. Previous parts: 1) The Lobster and the Octopus, 2) The Dolphin and the Wasp, and 3) The Reindeer and the Ape

Figure 1: Postulated inner workings of the Canard Digérateur, or digesting duck, an automaton exhibited by Jacques de Vaucanson in 1739.

A (nowadays surely—or hopefully—outdated) view, associated with Descartes, represents animals as little more than physical automata (la bête machine), reacting to stimuli by means of mechanical responses. Devoid of soul or spirit, they are little more than threads of physical causation briefly made flesh.

It might perhaps be considered a sort of irony that the modern age has seen an attack on Descartes’ position from both ends: while coming to the gradual realization that animals just may have rich inner lives of their own, a position that sees human nature and experience to be entirely explicable within a mechanical paradigm, going back to La Mettrie’s 1747 extension of Descartes’ view to humans with L’Homme Machine, has likewise been gaining popularity.

This series, so far, can be seen as a sort of synkretistic take on the question: within us, there is both a rule-based, step-by-step, inferential process of conscious reasoning, as well as an automatic, fast, heuristic and unconscious process of immediate judgment. These are, in dual-process psychology, most often simply referred to as (in that order) ‘System 2’ and ‘System 1’.

In my more colorful (if perhaps not necessarily any more helpful) terminology, System 2 is the lobster: separated from the outside world by a hard shell, it is the Cartesian rational ego, the dualistic self, analyzing the world with its claws, taking it apart down to its smallest constituents.

System 1, on the other hand, is the octopus: more fluid, it takes the environment within itself, becomes part of it, is always ‘outside in the world’, never entirely separate from it, experiencing it by being within it, bearing its likeness. The octopus, then, is the nondual foundation upon which the lobster’s analytic capacities are ultimately founded: without it, the lobster would be fully isolated from the exterior within its shell, the Cartesian homunculus sitting in the darkness of our crania without so much as a window to look out of. Read more »