Computers and Thought

Abstract

So began the rather caustic (some might even say misogynistic) introduction by Dr. Uttley to the influential Symposium on the Mechanisation of Thought Processes (Blake and Uttley 1959), held in England in November 1958. (The N.P.L. in the above quote refers to the U.K. National Physical Laboratory.) To the modern perspective this viewpoint might indeed appear a tad misogynistic, but we should perhaps approach this from the perspective of the late 1950s, when the vast majority of researchers and innovators in the field of computation and the (newly christened) AI field were male. This is a particularly interesting perspective as it was, in fact, mainly females that were employed to operate the early mechanical calculators in the 1930s and 1940s. However, the history of people as computers goes back well before this to the seventeenth century and the numerical calculation of the orbital trajectory of Halley’s comet (Grier 2001). Also, in many cases these pioneering human computers were men or boys.

Strong AI holds that a computing machine with the appropriate functional organization (e.g. a stored-program computer with the appropriate program) has a mind that perceives, thinks, and intends like a human mind

Philosophy of Science –An Encyclopaedia—on the connection between computation and thinking (Sarkar and Pfeifer 2006).