Abstract
Although fascination with the mechanization of human reasoning goes back to Leibnitz and Pascal, serious interest in artificial intelligence became manifest with the arrival of the computer age in the late forties. Since then, computers have become vastly more powerful and AI has become the subject of almost daily articles in the popular press. While it may be true that such articles are creating unrealistic expectations—as they have done throughout the history of AI—it should be borne in mind, as Jules Verne noted at the turn of the century, that scientific progress is driven by exaggerated expectations.1
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References
As an example of such expectations, the opening paragraph of my paper, entitled “Thinking Machines-A New Field in Electrical Engineering,” which appeared in the January 1950 issue of Columbia Engineering Quarterly, reads: ‘Psychologists Report Memory is Electrical,’ ‘Electronic Brain Able to Translate Foreign Languages is Being Built,’ ‘Electronic Brain Does Research,’ ‘Scientists Confer on Electronic Brain,’—these are some of the headlines that were carried in newspapers throughout the nation during the past year. What is behind these headlines? How will ‘electronic brains’ or ‘thinking machines’ affect our way of living? What is the role played by electrical engineers in the design of these devices? These are some of the questions that we shall try to answer in this article.” Many more examples may be found in H. Dreyfus, What Computers Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Intelligence, 2nd edition, Harper and Row, New York, 1979.
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© 1987 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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Zadeh, L.A. (1987). Fuzzy Sets, Usuality and Commonsense Reasoning. In: Vaina, L.M. (eds) Matters of Intelligence. Synthese Library, vol 188. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3833-5_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3833-5_13
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