2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

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P HILOSOPHY, NON-PHILOSOPHY, AND SCIENCE
3. Between engineering, science, and
philosophy.
The first and provisional definition of Artificial Intelligence provided in popular intro-
ductions to the field usually goes as follows: AI is the research effort directed toward the
construction of intelligent machines. These, in turn, are normally defined as those machines
whose behavior would be considered intelligent if exhibited by humans. Examples of intel-
ligent behaviors are problem-solving activities (like playing games, scheduling deliveries,
etc.), pattern-recognition tasks (and especially its most conspicuous example: vision), lan-
guage understanding, etc. Consequently, among the sub-fields of Artificial Intelligence we
find such areas like: “planning and problem solving”, “automatic deduction”, “vision,”
“learning,” etc. 24 The research is highly technical and requires sophisticated intellectual and
practical tools to be carried out. High-speed digital computers are the hardware of choice,
while sophisticated programming languages, not to speak of non-standard logical notation
systems, are the tools of the trade. Its practitioners have, usually although not always,
strong backgrounds in mathematics or computer science and carry out their research in lab-
oratories usually located within the school of engineering of major universities or in private
labs sponsored by the manufacturing industry. Furthermore, most AI research in the US is
and has been sponsored by a federal agency not precisely known for indulging in philo-
sophical speculations: the Department of Defense. 25 Thus, AI seems to be as far as possible
from any philosophical concern: rather, it looks like a precisely defined discipline within
the broader engineering field.
24. From the table of contents of one of the most widely used textbooks in the field: Avron Barr, Paul Cohen,
and Edward Feigenbaum, eds., Handbook of Artificial Intelligence (Los Altos, CA: Kaufmann,
1982), 3 voll.
25. There are no exhaustive data on the percentage of AI research sponsored by the military through DAR-
PA (Defense Agency etc.). A conservative estimate would probably put the figure at about 70%. See
Tom Athanasiou, “High Tech Politics: The Case Of Artificial Intelligence,” The Socialist Review, 17,
2 (1987) 6-37; Paul Edwards, The Closed aWorld (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996); and Philip Mirowski,
“When Games Grow Deadly Serious: The Military Influence On The Development Of Game Theory,”
Economics and National Security, C.D.W. Goodwin, ed., (Durham: Duke UP, 1991)