Turing Amongst the Robots:

Some Hidden Histories (and Possible Futures) of AI

By Dr Colin Williams

In 1948, the venerable American mathematician Norbert Wiener published Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine.  Despite its arcane title and bewildering mathematics, Cybernetics became an instant best seller and changed the world.  Far more than in name only, it’s the reason humanity now inhabits cyber.

This paper explores some of the long-neglected history of the cybernetics movement; and, relatedly, a hitherto overlooked yet formative schism between cybernetics and AI.  From these historical roots, we can glean a deeper understating of the current nature of AI and we can trace some of the potential trajectories of its future use.

One of the central lessons from this rich and previously disregarded history is that many of the truth statements we conventionally make about the nature and limitations of computers and AI are not rooted in scientific fact but, rather, they stem from a heated public philosophical debate about the nature of mind that erupted in Britain in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War.

It was this debate that spurred Alan Turing to write his now famous paper on “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” in 1950, and it was the ideas held by Norbert Wiener (and Turing) about the possibility of thinking machines that spurred John McCarthy to devise the field of AI as a covert counter to what he saw as the mistaken focus of cybernetics on emulating the operation of the human neurological system.

It is now apparent that much of what McCarthy thought was mistaken.  It is now also possible that much of what Wiener (and Turing) thought may yield the advances in non-human cognition that McCarthy’s approach never could.

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