At the time, of course, nobody knew to call this sort of thing “artificial intelligence” or “cognitive science.” But even so, the very act of programming computers—itself a totally new kind of endeavor—was forcing people to think much more carefully than ever before about what it meant to solve a problem. A computer was the ultimate Martian: you had to tell it everything: What are the data? How are they transformed? What are the steps to get from here to there? Those questions, in turn, led very quickly to issues that had bedeviled philosophers for centuries: What is knowledge? How is it
...more
