Abstract
The victories of the Go-playing artificial intelligence (AI) “AlphaGo” against professional player Lee Sedol in 2016 had a profound impact on public and academic perceptions of AI. This event shocked observers, as the ability of a machine to defeat a world champion human in a highly complex game seemed to indicate that a machine had achieved human-like—or more than human—intelligence. But why was AlphaGo so readily anthropomorphized by academic and non-academic audiences alike? Drawing from existing analyses of reactions to and arguments concerning AlphaGo and AI generally, this paper argues that “generative” cognitive science—a school of thought exemplified by the linguistic work of Noam Chomsky—offers two novel contributions to this subject. First, generativism sheds light on an irrational double standard in the study of the human mind in contrast to the study of non-cognitive systems—“methodological dualism”—which, I argue, has been transferred to evaluations of AlphaGo and other AI. Second, by exposing this irrational double standard in perceptions of AI, I employ generativism’s more well-known arguments concerning the nature of human intelligence and its scientific study to the evaluation of AI, exposing deficient interpretations widely used in the case of AlphaGo and AI generally.
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Notes
To temper the tone of this argument, it is worth noting that there are more than the two options of “Chomskyan generativism” and “behaviorism” in the study of the mind. One need not be a Chomskyan linguist, for example, to study language simply because they are not a behaviorist. I urge the reader to pay careful attention to the underlying mindset and reasoning as the argument progresses. I also wish to thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing out the need for this moderation.
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Carchidi, V.J. Do submarines swim? Methodological dualism and anthropomorphizing AlphaGo. AI & Soc 39, 775–787 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-022-01491-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-022-01491-2