From Society to Landscape: Alternative Metaphors for Artificial Intelligence

representation. Further discussion showed that many of the hard problems encountered by AI researchers derive from constraints imposed by the perspective of attack and might be avoidable attributes of the mind-modeling problem. Similarly, most of the points attacked by critics of AI are more properly directed toward one or more of the mechanist, formalistic, or representational presuppositions rather than the “grand objective” of AI itself. It seems desirable, therefore, to determine if alternative perspectives might yield alternative methods of attack. One fruitful starting point in the quest to find alternative (or complementary) perspectives should be an inventory of metaphors that have been or are being Previous examination of the computational metaphor exposed behavior inconsistent with that expected of metaphors in general. Specifically, despite demonstrated dissimilarity in the referents of brains (minds) and computers, the metaphor persists, not dissolves. Seeking an explanation of this behavior led to the conclusion that the computational metaphor is not truly a metaphor at all. Instead, it is a kind of shorthand expression, a label, for a set of philosophical presuppositions. These presuppositions generate a particular perspective from which the problem of how to model a mind has been approached —a perspective that is intrinsically formalistic, mechanistic, and dependent on the methodological dualism that results from a Articles