Does AI get more hype than it deserves?
How different would we think about artificial intelligence if AI pioneers Allen Newell and Herbert Simon had won support for the seemingly less hype-prone term of “complex information processing,” rather than “artificial intelligence,” which was ultimately adopted by the field?
On the surface, this thought experiment is interesting because it asks if artificial intelligence is intrinsically hyped. That is, is the word alone enough to get us in trouble? This was the focus of a recent Wall Street Journal article where columnist Christopher Mims asks experts in artificial intelligence whether the name alone produces confusion and hype?
Mims quotes Melanie Mitchell, a professor at the Santa Fe Institute, who quips, “What would the world be like if it [AI] was called that [complex information processing] instead?” Unfortunately, Mims uses Mitchell’s thought experiment as a punchline at the very end of the article, not as a counterfactual. Therefore, we will explore what facts surround the rhetorical question and answer whether the world would be better without artificial intelligence.
Newell and Simon were the only two participants at the Dartmouth Workshop (considered to be the founding event for artificial intelligence as a field) in 1956, who had developed a rudimentary “intelligent” machine. Their experience is viewed as grounded in practice, and consequently, they are often seen favorably as being more pragmatic than their peers. Complex information processing, as an alternative to artificial intelligence, seems to be viewed through this prism. Perhaps it is true that Newell and Simon understood how tricky “intelligence” would be to define or solve. To be sure, artificial intelligence is hyped because of its connection to natural intelligence and research on tasks performed by humans.
Whether the world would be a better place with complex information processing still requires us to determine if complex information processing was envisaged any differently than artificial intelligence and if artificial intelligence was treated differently by these two men than their peers. Alas, it does not appear that Newell and Simon thought complex information processing was less hype-prone or treated artificial intelligence differently from their peers.
Simon summarized his research goals in aspirational terms such as “to make us [humans] a part of nature instead of apart from it.” Aside from beautiful alliteration, Simon’s goal was to discover and ultimately build an intelligent machine that would exceed human intelligence and replace the capacities of the human brain. To Simon, solving intelligence was not merely an intellectual challenge but a spiritual pursuit.
The philosopher, and professor at the University of California, John Searle, explains how Simon would say that we already have machines that can literally think. According to Searle, there was no question of waiting for some future machine because Simon celebrated existing computers already having thoughts in the same sense that humans do.
Newell and Simon were computationalists and true believers at that. They believed that intelligence is information processing.
