Philosophy and AI : Artificial Intelligence and its Discontents

The Historical Context of the philosophical debate relating to the issue of whether Artificial Intelligence is anything more than a hypothetical metaphor awaiting more exact characterisation dates back to the 1940's and 50's. The central figure who initiated this discussion was, of course Alan Turing, the mathematical genius who worked with English military intelligence on the Enigma Project. The invention of ACE(The automatic computing engine) and its role in solving a problem that had defeated the best minds in England was the initiating event of the claim that machines of this kind were in a sense "intelligent". Intelligence, of course, is a psychological term with a contested psychological definition as was evidenced by the discussions that followed Piaget's theories and the attempts to construct tools to measure this elusive capacity. This work argues that it is to Philosophy we must turn if we are to clarify a problem that was challenging theoreticians of the scientific and psychological community.