American Academy of Political and Social Science

Machine Cognition and the Downloading of Scientific Intellect

Author(s): Murray Aborn
Source: The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 495,
Telescience: Scientific Communication in the Information Age (Jan., 1988), pp. 135-143
Published by: Sage Publications, Inc. in association with the American Academy of
Political and Social Science
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ANNALS, AAPSS, 495, January 1988

Machine Cognition and the

Downloading of Scientific Intellect

By MURRAY ABORN

ABSTRACT: This article concerns itself with what artificial intelligence

(AI) may have in store for how science will be conducted and communicated
in the not too distant future. It highlights some of the AI literature to show
that computers have been successfully programmed to perform many of
the procedures involved in scientific decision making and problem solving.
It briefly reviews the ongoing debate over whether systems designed to
exhibit intelligent behavior really think in the same sense that humans do.
Finally, it reports on the possibility that more of the process of science will
in the future be carried out by such systems as a result of research linking AI
with progress in cognitive science.

Murray Aborn is senior scientist in the Division of Social and Economic Science,
National Science Foundation. He also serves as program director of that division's
Measurement Methods and Data Improvement Program. He holds the Ph.D. from
Columbia University, is a member of Sigma Xi, and is afellow of the American Psychological
Association, the American Statistical Association, and the New York Academy of Sciences.

NOTE: This article was written while the author was employed by the government, and is in the
public domain. The ideas and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not
necessarily represent the views of the National Science Foundation or the United States government.

135

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 136 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY

First speaker: "What else comes to

NO publication on the information
age would be complete without mind when you think of your
some discussion of artificial intelligence father?"
(AI). AI is the intellectual progeny of the Second speaker: "Bullies."
information age and seems a good candi- First speaker: "Does that have any-
date to become its successor. Indeed, the thing to do with the fact that your
succeeding era could one day be named boyfriend made you come here?"
the age of the artificial, with deference to
H. A. Simon's Sciences of the Artificial, Conversation
a seminal work thematically dedicated
to the proposition that the methods and The preceding specimen discourse is,
as the reader will surely have guessed,
findings of the natural sciences may be
taken from a dialogue between a patient
extended to artificial objects.'
and her psychotherapist. It is reminiscent
HISTORICAL HIGHLIGHTS of a therapeutic technique common in
the 1960s. There is nothing remarkable
First speaker: "Speak up!" about the exchange except that one of
Second speaker: "Men are all alike."
the parties to it is a computer program.2
First speaker: "In what ways?"
The program, called "ELIZA," was
Second speaker: "They're always
written to mimic the psychotherapeutic
bugging us about somethingprocess.
or It did so surprisingly success-
other."
fully, largely owing to its choice of
First speaker: "Can you thinkmethod-the
of a noninterventionist, Roger-
specific example?"
ian approach in which the therapist
Second speaker: "Well, my boyfriend
behaves much in the manner of a sound-
made me come here."
ing board.
First speaker: "Your boyfriend made
ELIZA is precious in the annals of AI
you come here?"
because it is an excellent example of
Second speaker: "He says I'm de-early attempts to turn the computer into
pressed much of the time."
a natural language processor and apply
First speaker: "I am sorry to hear that
this capability toward practical ends.
you are depressed." But it has also received attention for the
Second speaker: "I need some help, recoil that its creator exhibited when he
that much seems certain."
discovered the naive subservience with
First speaker: "What would it mean
which the device was being espoused,
to you if you got some help?"
even by elements of the scientific com-
Second speaker: "Perhaps I couldmunity. Ten years after he wrote ELIZA,
learn to get along with my mother."
Joseph Weizenbaum was to write, "What-
First speaker: "Who else in yourever intelligence a computer can muster,
family takes care of you?"
however it may be acquired, it must
Second speaker: "My father."
always and necessarily be alien to any
First speaker: "Your father?"
Second speaker: "You are like my 2. Joseph Weizenbaum, "ELIZA-A Com-
father in some ways." puter Program for the Study of Natural Language
Communication between Man and Machine,"
1. Herbert A. Simon, The Science of the Communications of the Association for Com-
Artificial (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1969). puting Machinery, 9:36-45 (1966).

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 MACHINE COGNITION 137

and all authentic human concerns. The complete-albeit exceedingly simple-

very asking of the question, 'What does narratives and either paraphrase them
a psychiatrist know that we cannot tell a or draw meaningful inferences from
computer?' is a monstrous obscenity ... them.
a sign of the madness of our times."3
Consultation
Comprehension
So-called expert systems are an AI
Weizenbaum's reaction was not based success story. They are essentially consul-
solely on moral rage. Early natural tative in character, serving as decision-
language processing programs were writ- making aides in which the computer is
ten under the assumption that useful endowed with the same sort of expertise
question-answering procedures could be that a practitioner or researcher might
created employing nothing more than obtain from a person who is highly
the syntactic information in the sentence skilled in some domain of knowledge.
together with the denotative meaning of One of the first such systems, MYCIN,
a restricted set of words. But not every- is a good example. MYCIN is designed
one was deluded in this regard. It was to provide an attending physician with
clear to some researchers early on that advice on diagnosis and therapy for
sans cognition-in the absence of exten- infectious diseases that might arise sud-
sive world-knowledge-natural language denly during hospitalization and require
processors could never be made into immediate action. Evaluations of MYCIN
anything like fluent conversationalists, have given results that tend to satisfy a
to say nothing of performing tasks requir- criterion many researchers would accept
ing translation or interpretation. as authoritative-the so-called Turing
Thus scientific research in Al increas-
test-in that MYCIN compares favor-
ingly turned to natural language pro- ably with the performance of human
cessing systems that took semantic con- experts. This comparison has encouraged
siderations into account, and that trend the development of extensions of the
produced programs such as LUNAR, system, such as NEOMYCIN, which are
which has been used to answer questions aimed at providing tools for medical
about rocks brought back from the education and training.4
moon; SHRDLU, which is able to simu-
late, albeit in a very primitive fashion, a Common sense
robot manipulating objects on a table-
top; MARGIE, which, if fed certain Although expert systems are now
English sentences, can make inferences considered to be essential components
about the sorts of actions likely to of advanced decision-making systems in
eventuate; and SAM and PAM, which many areas of science, medicine, and
can accept as input text containing engineering, their development is ham-
pered by serious limitations even apart
from those having to do with the tech-
3. Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power
and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calcula-
tion (San Francisco: Freeman, 1976). The quota-
tion cited here is taken from Grant Fjermedal, The 4. Avron Barr and Edward A. Feigenbaum,
Tomorrow Makers (New York: Macmillan, 1986),
The Handbook ofArtificial Intelligence (Stanford,
pp. 106-7. CA: HeurisTech Press, 1982), 2:184-92, 267-78.

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 138 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY

nology of downloading skill-level

of receiving badhuman
advice, existing agricul-
expertise. tural, entomological, geographic, and
Expert systems are meant to expert
zoological operate
systems are envisioned
in the real world rather as
than in highly
functioning in an integrated fashion
controlled and restrictedalongside
laboratory en- and techniques
other AI tools
vironments. They must therefore
to simulate be
the behavior of entire ecosys-
capable of dealing with real-world socialprocessing and
tems. Natural language
and psychological problems, beother
some of the able to
methodologies of AI
accumulate and integratediscussed
rapidly earlier in the present article
intro-
duced new information, are
and both
described as possess
integral components of
and know when to applythe proposed resource
common sense. management
scheme.University,
John McCarthy of Stanford The scheme also incorporates
one of the founders of AI, gives
techniques the
and lastof AI such as
products
of these requirements toprobotics and image
priority. processing, very
Speak-
ing at a 1984 conference and upon
briefly touched using
later in the present
MYCIN as a case in point,
article. McCarthy
repeated what he had been saying since
1958, namely, that acquiring a better
Problem solving
understanding of commonsense facts
and methods is the key problemHeuristics, or facing
the use of indeterminis-
artificial intelligence.5 tic search strategies, seeks to provide
shortcuts that avoid the necessity for
Simulation heavy computation in automated problem
solving. This line of research is promi-
The limitations of expert systems nently associated with Allen Newell and
notwithstanding, these systems are con-Herbert Simon of Carnegie-Mellon Uni-
sidered to be among the building blocks versity. It began at the virtual outset of
now available for very large-scale applica-the field and stands today at its forefront.
tions of AI. An excellent illustration is a It is a methodology that has already
recent article in Science that assigns AI aexpressed itself in important practical
central role in the management of nat- developments-expert systems, for ex-
ural resources.6 Although appropriate ample-and that is sure to affect science
warnings are sounded concerning theireven more profoundly in the future.
limitations and the consequent dangers Newell and Simon's General Problem
Solver appeared in 1957 as a first attempt
5. John McCarthy, "Some Expert Systems
Need Common Sense," in Computer Culture: The to mechanize problem solving in a gen-
Scientific, Intellectual, and Social Impact of the eral, rather than a domain-specific,
Computer, ed. Heinz R. Pagels, Annals of the mode. It became the subject of ten years
New York Academy of Sciences Series, vol. 426 of work aimed at improving the pro-
(New York: New York Academy of Sciences,
gram's versatility in playing games, prov-
1984), pp. 129-37. For a synopsis of authoritative
viewpoints on the subject of implanting common- ing theorems, and solving puzzles.7 Its
sense knowledge, see the Panel Discussion in ibid., major impact, however, was goal direc-
pp. 138-60. tional, not technical. Some of the conclu-
6. Robert N. Coulson, L. Joseph Folse, and sions reached by Newell and Simon
Douglas K. Loh, "Artificial Intelligence and
Natural Resource Management," Science, 7. Barr and Feigenbaum, Handbook ofArti-
237:262-67 (July 1987). ficial Intelligence, 1:113-18.

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 MACHINE COGNITION 139

were influential in turnin

Two additional quotations are inter-
searchers jected at this
away fromjuncture because
thethey so pr
empty-headed nicely bridge
applied the preceding historical
syste
trying to make highlights to the next section of this
computers s
helped to establish anis id
article, which, for better or worse,
places the emphasis on A
headed "Thinking Machines." The first
laboratory for quotation is taken again from Herbert
studying the
nature of human Simon. In it, Professor Simon reveals
intelligenc
the scientific significance of BACON:
Rediscovery "From a psychological standpoint, there
No matter how one views where the cannot be any differences between pro-
cesses of original discovery and processes
emphasis really lies, AI already possesses
of independent rediscovery."9
powers that rival what have always been
The second quotation is more recent.
considered to be among the higher-
It, too, contains a reference to the
order human cognitive abilities. Almost
as significant, the speed with which itscientific significance of BACON's ability
has acquired these powers is no less thanto rediscover physical laws, to wit: "We
can conclude that we don't have to
breathtaking. The span of time we are
dealing with in surveying the develop-postulate any kind of mysterious pro-
ment of AI-albeit ever so cursorily-is cesses, any kind of fundamentally un-
only about thirty years. From the Gen- known-much less unknowable-pro-
cesses to account for what in humans we
eral Problem Solver in 1957 to a program
aptly named BACON in 1979-80, the like to call creativity. Hence, we can't
field has stepped-or, more appro- establish the creative process as an Iron
priately, leaped-into science's most re-
vered domain. Here is how the creator
American Scientist, 69:300-309 (May-June 1981).
of BACON, Herbert Simon, describesBACON is no longer alone in this area of effort.
the achievement: For instance, Research News, 37(5-6):5 (May-
June 1986), reports that Manfred Kochen at the
The process of scientific discovery is some- University of Michigan is developing PLAUSIBLE
times driven by data, sometimes by theory, MATHEMACHINE, a program that will be able
and perhaps most often by a combination of to learn geometric principles on its own. It will
both. BACON explores the data-driven as- attempt to rediscover the Pythagorean theorem,
pects of discovery. Given data on the dis- for example.
tances of the planets and the periods of their 9. Simon, "Studying Human Intelligence,"
orbits, BACON quickly rediscovers Kepler's p. 307. There are some AI programs in the nature
third law. Given data on an electric circuit of expert systems that may be said to perform
original discovery rather than rediscovery. One
with different lengths of resistance wire, it
called TETRAD supplies assistance in the area of
rediscovers Ohm's law. In a similar manner,
statistical modeling. TETRAD automatically fil-
it rediscovers the inverse square law of ters through large quantities of nonexperimental
gravitational attraction, Snell's law of diffrac- data in search of causal explanations, helping the
tion, Black's law of temperature, and many researcher to select among the great number of
of the chemical laws discovered by Dalton, alternative causal models that nonexperimental
Gay-Lussac, Avogadro, and Cannizzarro in research can generate. A detailed description of
the first half of the nineteenth century.8 TETRAD is contained in Clark Glymour et al.,
Discovering Causal Structure (Pittsburgh, PA:
8. Herbert A. Simon, "Studying Human In- Carnegie-Mellon University, Laboratory for Com-
telligence by Creating Artificial Intelligence," putational Linguistics, 1986).

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 140 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY

ambivalence
Curtain that limits what computers surrounding
can the future of
do."'10 thinking machines in science. The author
of the history is Lew Kowarski, a physi-
THINKING MACHINES cist at Western Europe's largest nuclear
research facility, Conseil Europeen pour
Even if we were to accept as fact that
Recherches Nucldaires, in Geneva. Kowar-
there is no apparent limit to what com-
ski presented that history at an interna-
puters can do, is this the same as saying
tional conference on information process-
that computers will one day ing possess
held in Vienna in 1974.
minds indistinguishable from our own?Kowarski related how the use of
At a 1984 conference sponsored by the
computers in physics research facilities
New York Academy of Sciences, Marvin
was at first regarded purely in terms of
Minsky of the Massachusetts Institute
assisting human decision making, how
of Technology put it this way: "If you
the computer soon became the spearhead
made a machine that looks as if it thinks,
of a drive toward full automation, why
would it really think?"" On that same
plans to make the computer self-suffi-
occasion, John McCarthy provided one
cient failed, and how this subsequently
kind of answer: "A program thatresulted
simu- in an accommodation between
lates thirst is not going to be thirsty. For
man and machine that he called "symbio-
example, there is no way to relieve it
tic." He thought the relationship had
with real water."'2
real possibilities but concluded with the
The idea of electronic computers as
uneasy feeling that it could be one of
thinking machines goes back to a book
temporary convenience on the com-
published in 1949 with the title Giant
puter's part and that renewed attempts
Brains or Machines That Think.'3 Ex-
to achieve a complete automation, "to
actly thirty years later another book
compress the human sector," as he put
popular among scientists appeared with
it, were, back in 1974, already in sight.'5
the title Machines Who Think. 4 One of
the key questions debated at the 1984 The physicist's tale. In very abbre-
conference mentioned earlier concerned viated and simplified fashion, the tale
the change in metaphor from "that" to goes like this. Research in high-energy
"who." physics involves observation of how the
paths of elementary particles form tracks
Hopes and fears of drops, bubbles, or sparks when they
pass through a specially prepared me-
A case history from the field of
dium. Photographs of the tracks provide
physics furnishes a good example of the
data crucial to physical theory; however,
the work entailed in scanning thousands
10. Herbert A. Simon, "The Steam Engine
upon thousands of visual records, mea-
and the Computer: What Makes Technology
Revolutionary," EDUCOM Bulletin, 22(1):2-5suring each detail, and converting these
(Spring 1987). measurements into meaningful physical
11. Pagels, ed., Computer Culture, p. 139. information was, in the mid-1950s, fast
12. Ibid., p. 151.
13. Edmund C. Berkeley, Giant Brains or 15. Lew Kowarski, "Man-Computer Sym-
Machines That Think (New York: John Wiley, biosis: Fears and Hopes," in Human Choice and
1949). Computers, ed. Enid Mumford and Harold Sack-
14. Pamela McCorduck, Machines Who Think man (Amsterdam: North-Holland; New York:
(San Francisco: Freeman, 1979). Elsevier, 1975), pp. 305-12.

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 MACHINE COGNITION 141

tration's Ames Research Center, proh

making experimentation points
up the continuing
The answer lay in computers ambivalence sur-
rounding
not for all the tasks computersinvolved,
as thinking ma-
chines--even in the minds of
for what computers scientists
were th
stood to do well,
who can laynamely, to
valid claim to being authori- pe
number-crunching operation
ties in the field.16 According to Denning,
of the
for processing three books
the he reviewed, one
measureme
ning continued
leaves the to be
reader with entire
the impression
and a human thatoperator
the search for "machines that contr
think"
robot optical sensor
is that
futile; another is skeptical but nottook
so
ments of the tracks. As architectures
sure that new computer confide
computer's potential
might not give the machinegrewmindlike a
proved hardware and
properties after softwa
all; and the third is
confident that mindlike
the scene, however, behavior can wer
plans
total indeed be of
automation elicited from
the machines if their
entire
tation process.
architecture The
can be made tohuman
resemble
would intervene only
the human nervous system. if th
To demon-
yelled for help.
strate confidence in this conception, the
The scheme third
did notthe
book provides work,
details of a
fact Cellular
that it did notModel Arithmetic
may Computer,
be rea
human superiority. But,
on which the author Kowar
holds a patent.
"the story is Another
not ended:
pertinent thi
review of some
situation never stands
recency also reflects thestill."
continuing am- H
to say bivalence surrounding the questionin
that improvements of c
controlled whether computers
image can actually think. w
processing
in view andThis
could presage
one was written by Raymond Kurz-
which novel weil, who invented the world's first
experimentation
avoided because, being
optical scanning unm
system-the Kurzweil
it would be regarded
Reading Machine foras too lab
the Blind-which
this comes about,
converts printed text into synthetic
speech. In his review, Kurzweil tends to
we will have adapted our deman
debunk much of the enthusiasm propa-
can be supplied by a machine a
other way around. AI
gated by A researchers
tool andand
asserts that
a s
when blindly the goal of the Alits
obeying enterprise "should not
master's
a subtle way of beimproving
to copy human intelligence
its in the
own
putting next generation
limitations onof the
computers, but rather
choice
be issued. to concentrate on the unique strengths
of machine intelligence, which for the
Ambivalence revisited foreseeable future will be quite different
from the strengths of human intelli-
Kowarski's uncertainties about the
gence." Nonetheless, Kurzweil's article
future persist with unabated intensity
concludes by noting that "some ob-
today. In a recent review of books servers have actually suggested that arti-
currently on the market, Peter Denning,
ficial intelligence is inherently on the
director of the Research Institute for
Advanced Computer Science at the Na- 16. Peter J. Denning, "The Science of Com-
puting: Will Machines Ever Think?" American
tional Aeronautics and Space Adminis-Scientist, 74:342-46 (July-Aug. 1986).

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142 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY

thefeasibility,
moving edge of technical proposition that that
machines undergo
it should be defined asevolutionary adaptation no less than
those computer
science problems we have organic
not yetformssolved."17
do and that the cell, the
brain, and the steam engine are
LIVING-BRAIN MACHINES
the technological innovations of chains of
deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), which have
A number of other recent writings
spent the past three billion years evolving
suggest that Lew Kowarski's concept of
vessels to carry themselves into new environ-
a future characterized by man-machine
ments. Man and machine may both grow
symbiosis has evolved into the idea of a
obsolete in the long run, as have 99.99
brave new world populated by immortal percent of all the species that have appeared.
man-machine chimeras. One such work
But it is equally possible that the two will
is a book composed largely of conversa- merge, in some unimaginable form, to escape
tions with renowned computer scientists a dying planet.
and their young prot6ges who go by the It may sound outrageous to suggest that life
sobriquet "hackers." 18The conversations and nonlife could ever blend or breed, but
took place in prominent AI laboratories viewed in the context of the history of life-
in various parts of the Western world. from its prebiotic origins to its present day
Here we discover a sincere belief in, ability to manufacture itself in the labora-
apparently accompanied by the begin- tory-such a feat begins to look not only
nings of a serious attempt to produce, plausible but inevitable.20
computer-controlled robots capable of
performing brain surgery-not for the A sober note
purpose of removing diseased brain To return to the near-term future
tissue, but for the purpose of analyzing
rather than end on a possibly depressing
and simulating the neuronal and chem-
long-term note, the philosophy espoused
ical makeup of that particular brain and
by most of today's AI practitioners
downloading it-that is, transferring it,
projects Al's value to science and human-
in information-age argot-to a man-
ity as coming from the growing collabora-
made body.
The Tomorrow Makers was written
tion between Al and research in cognitive
science, wherein the goal is not the
by a journalist-albeit a science writer
reification of human intelligence in com-
of respectability-and will no doubt be
putational forms but the use of com-
thought to suffer from its journalistic
puters as investigative devices for study-
tenor. Not so Margulis and Sagan's
ing brain-behavior relationships. This
Microcosmos, a work bearing all the
use of computers has no substitute.
tokens of scientific credibility.19 Mar-
Studying organs with billions of ex-
gulis and Sagan provide a bookload of
tremely small, sensitive, working parts
scientifically based evidence to back up
packed together is totally new to science,
and both ethical and technological limita-
17. Raymond Kurzweil, "What Is Artificial
Intelligence Anyway?" American Scientist,
73:258-64 (May-June 1985). Sagan, Microcosmos: Four Billion Years ofEvolu-
18. Fjermedal, Tomorrow Makers. tion from Our Microbial Ancestors (New York:
19. Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, "Strange
Summit Books, 1987).
Fruit on the Tree of Life," Sciences, 26:3, 38-45 20. Margulis and Sagan, "Strange Fruit," p.
(May-June 1986), adapted from Margulis and
40.

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MACHINE COGNITION 143

tions preclude investigations

ophy of scienc
cells of higher animalstoo
providing wh
actually working and
reduce learni
ignoran
Cognitive science encomp
help pave the
areas as sensory
the informatio
human con
well pay
visual perception, the p
and speec
pursued by researchers
ment, howeveide
increasingly
the neurosciences, cognitive a
computational linguistics,ele
mysterious an

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