2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

B ETWEEN ENGINEERING, SCIENCE, AND PHILOSOPHY.
The goal of AI is to understand intelligence well enough to make machines
that reach human level intelligence. Achieving this goal probably requires
new ideas and therefore cannot be scheduled. 28
McCarthy’s definition does not seem to take AI too far astray into theoretical space.
After all, it can be argued that every engineering discipline is faced with a similar difficulty
at the moment of its inception: the construction of an internal combustion engine, for ex-
ample, depended and called for quite a bit of basic research in thermodynamics. Still there
is an important difference concerning the reference of “intelligence.” The term is actually
used in a strictly metonymic form in the expression “Artificial Intelligence.” As Turing’s
paper makes clear, the real goal of the research is not “intelligence” per se, but the broader
category of thinking in general. It may be worth remembering that, in spite of its title,
“Computing Machinery and Intelligence” (the paper in which Turing proposed his test)
contains the word “intelligence” only once and in a peripheral section. Instead, its very first
sentence makes clear what is at stake, since Turing opens by saying: “I propose to ask the
question: ‘Can machines think?’” and then goes on to propose its test as a more precise ren-
dering of such a vaguely stated question. 29
This, of course, is nothing new. That Artificial Intelligence studies the “mental” in gen-
eral, the mind as such, is common currency in the field. Philosophers, in particulars, like to
stress this point, but AI practitioners as well are very much aware of the bearings of their
research. Thus, it is not only from the usual critics of AI, like John Searle and Hubert Drey-
fus, that we hear this thesis but also from the leading figures in the discipline like John Mc-
Carthy, Marvin Minsky, Herbert Simon and Allen Newell, etc. 30 What I am stressing here
is the strict connection between the theoretical drive that aims at the study of “thinking”
28. John McCarthy, “AI Needs a Basic Research Document,” available at http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc.
29. Alan Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” The Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence, Margaret
Boden, ed., (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990) 40; the essay was originally published in
1950. The term intelligence occurs toward the end of the paper, in the section devoted to the possibility
and feasibility of a learning machine, when Turing remarks that “by the exercise of intelligence” the
AI researcher should be able to speed up the selection of better and better forms of thinking machines,
i.e. he should be able to accelarate the machine equivalent of the natural evolutionary processes that
has most likely brought about “natural” human intelligence (62). In short, the only use of the word “intelligence”
in the paper means something very different from its use in AI.
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