"Calculation and the Division of Labor, 1750-1950"
by Daston, L (2018)
Abstract
Calculating machines placed new demands on human intelligence, but did they pave the way for Artificial Intelligence? They did arguably expand the domain of algorithms, by forcing a rethinking of how to optimize Big Calculation at every level, from the innards of the machines to the organization of work fl ow to the attentive interaction with the machines. But making calculation even more algorithmic, in the sense of following standardized, step-by-step procedures, is a long way from making intelligence algorithmic. For that to happen, the reduction of intelligence to a form of calculation had to seem both possible and desirable.
Key Passage
the effect of making calculation mechanical was to disqualify it as an intelligent activity. It would require a complete reconceptualization of both calculation and intelligence in order to make Artificial or Machine Intelligence something other than an oxymoron. It is only with the benefit of twenty-twenty hindsight that calculating machines and Artificial Intelligence belong to the same story. If sometime in the first half of the twentieth century calculation ceased to be a form of intelligence, sometime in the latter half of the twentieth century intelligence ceased to be intellectual, no longer a matter of mental processes accessible to the thinking subject — the twinned birth of the cognitive sciences and Machine Intelligence. (p.30)
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