Thinking Machines: Can There Be? Are We?

Artificial intelligence researchers predict that _thinking machines_ will take over our mental work, just as their mechanical predecessors were intended to eliminate physical drudgery. Critics have argued with equal fervor that _thinking machine_ is a contradiction in terms. Computers, with their foundations of cold logic, can never be creative or insightful or possess real judgment. Although my own understanding developed through active participation in artificial intelligence research, I have now come to recognize a larger grain of truth in the criticisms than in the enthusiastic predictions. The source of the difficulties will not be found in the details of silicon micro-circuits or of Boolean logic, but in a basic philosophy of patchwork rationalism that has guided the research. In this paper I review the guiding principles of artificial intelligence and argue that as now conceived it is limited to a very particular kind of intelligence: one that can usefully be likened to bureaucracy. In conclusion I will briefly introduce an orientation I call hermeneutic constructivism and illustrate how it can lead to an alternative path of design. The work presented here was supported by the System Development Foundation under a grant to the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University. A version of this paper was presented at the conference on _Humans, Animals, and Machines: Boundaries and Projections,_ sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center in April, 1987. It was published in a volume of papers from that conference.