[SIGCIS-Members] New Article on History of AI Criticism

[Colin Kelley Garvey]

Dear all —

I would like to invite you to check out my new article in the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing — happy to send a copy of the PDF if your institution doesn’t provide access.

The “General Problem Solver” Does Not Exist: Mortimer Taube and the Art of AI Criticism

Abstract:
This article reconfigures the history of artificial intelligence (AI) and its accompanying tradition of criticism by excavating the work of Mortimer Taube, a pioneer in information and library sciences, whose magnum opus, Computers and Common Sense: The Myth of Thinking Machines (1961), has been mostly forgotten. To convey the essence of his distinctive critique, the article focuses on Taube's attack on the general problem solver (GPS), the second major AI program. After examining his analysis of the social construction of this and other “thinking machines,” it concludes that, despite technical changes in AI, much of Taube's criticism remains relevant today. Moreover, his status as an “information processing” insider who criticized AI on behalf of the public good challenges the boundaries and focus of most critiques of AI from the past half-century. In sum, Taube's work offers an alternative model from which contemporary AI workers and critics can learn much.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9324949

Yours,

Shunryu Colin Garvey

———
Affiliate Fellow
Institute for Human-Centered AI<https://hai.stanford.edu/people/shunryu-colin-garvey> (HAI)
Stanford University
———

Select Publications:

2021 - “Artificial Intelligence & its Discontents.”<https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/yisr20/46/1-2?nav=tocList> special double issue of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews

2021 - “Unsavory medicine for technological civilization: Introducing ‘Artificial Intelligence & its Discontents’.”<https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03080188.2020.1840820> Interdisciplinary Science Reviews

2021 - “The ‘General Problem Solver’ Does Not Exist: Mortimer Taube & the Art of AI Criticism.”<https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9324949> IEEE Annals of the History of Computing

2020 - “COVID-19 Digital Health Innovation Policy: A Portal to Alternative Futures in the Making.”<https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/omi.2020.0089> OMICS: A Journal of Integrative Biology

2019 - "Artificial Intelligence and Japan’s Fifth Generation: The Information Society, Neoliberalism, and Alternative Modernities.”<https://phr.ucpress.edu/content/88/4/619> Pacific Historical Review
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