“You helped me discover my ability to want.” — Samantha, the operating system in Spike Jonze’s Her
As I understand it, research into computers and thinking has basically proceeded along two tracks. In the spirit of a thought experiment, I’d like to suggest a third track — the creation of what I’ll call a “needing machine.”
But first, let me sketch the two main tracks. My sketch is based largely on a narrative offered by Edward Feigenbaum in a recent interview. The first main track of research into computers and thinking belongs to the field of cognitive science, which is closely aligned with psychology. Cognitive science focuses on the attempt to formalize the ways that human beings think. The idea is that once human thought has been formalized, it could conceivably be programmed into a computer that would then be able to mimic human thought. The dream would be the creation of an artificial brain embodied in a computer, capable of understanding in ways that are similar to the ways a human being understands.
The second main track of research is what gets called “artificial intelligence.” Unlike cognitive science, artificial intelligence is less concerned with how humans think, and more concerned with using computers to accomplish particular, concrete tasks. It’s more aligned with computer science than with psychology. Initially, some computer scientists assumed that the path toward useful computer cognition would rely on insights into human cognition. But this isn’t how things turned out. The achievements of artificial intelligence have not resulted from building computers that think like human beings any more than the achievements of mechanized flight have resulted from building airplanes whose wings flap like the wings of birds. Deep Blue didn’t think like a human chess player, and Google’s search engine doesn’t think like a human librarian. Both were designed by human beings to solve very particular problems using methods suited to computers with little or no concern for whether those methods resembled the methods used by human beings to solve similar problems. The fact that a computer was able to outperform an exceptionally qualified human being in chess says more about the limits of chess as a test of cognition than it does about computers’ thinking abilities.