There's Nothing Artificial About AI
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By Peter J. Nofel
Associate Editor

Artificial Intelligence, AI for short. Until recently, those two letters conjured up images of the HAL 9000 computer in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey or less malevolently, the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz. In the former case, AI was seen as a threat, and in the latter was fantasy. Artificial intelligence, or perhaps more properly, machine intelligence, falls into the middle ground between fear and fantasy. Experts in machine intelligence have been toiling in their field for 30 years, and their results are now showing in the computer market.

Artificial intelligence is the second computer revolution. Professor Edward A. Feigenbaum of the Computer Science Department and Knowledge Systems Laboratory at Stanford University, states the first computer revolution was in "number crunching," the processing of data. The second revolution is computer processing of knowledge – what in people is called thinking.

In a recent series of seminars in Europe on AI, Feigenbaum, who is also a member of the board of directors of Sperry Corporation, Blue Bell, PA, said "Thinking takes place in a physical symbol system, and it can either be biological or electronic. The belief that the process of physical symbol manipulation is the touchstone of AI." Just as computers manipulate information in a data processing system, people manipulate physical symbols in a knowledge-based system. Thinking was once the sole domain of humans, but no longer.

"Thinking down by a biological 'machine' can be duplicated in an electronic one," Feigenbaum states. His view of thinking is a purely mechanistic one: if the results of the process fulfill all of the requirements to be defined as thought, then the system producing it is thinking. He says he believes there is no "ghost in the machine" driving thought . . .

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