Classical Cognitive Science and “Good Old Fashioned AI”

Abstract

The last chapter discussed some of the historical and theoretical background that led to AI’s appearance on the intellectual landscape in the 1950s and 1960s. Its emergence was more-or-less concurrent with the birth of the interdisciplinary enterprise we now know as cognitive science, and this chapter examines what may usefully be regarded as the first major paradigm for cognitive science in general and AI in particular: the idea that cognition is what computers do — rule-governed symbol manipulation.

“You mean, you’re trying to design a computer that thinks like a human being?”

“In principle, that’s the ultimate objective.”

“And feels like a human being? A computer that has hangovers and falls in love and suffers bereavements?”

“A hangover is a kind of pain, and pain has always been a difficult nut to crack,” says Ralph carefully. “But I don’t see any inherent impossibility in designing and programming a robot that could get into a symbiotic relationship with another robot and would exhibit symptoms of distress if the other robot were put out of commission.”

“You’re joking, of course?”

“Not at all.”

David Lodge (2001) Thinks