god’s language: lisp and the fiction of AI

Contributors are invited to consider one or other of these topics:

themes

• AI’s fiction: robots, cyborgs, computers; language amongst the computer scientists
• the cultural history of representations of AI and its inventors (Alan Turing for example); leibniz et. al.

notes

this contribution looks at how the early communities of AI development have built up a series of narratives around the power of language, and particularly logical language, and how assumptions about form and content allowed the development of modern computation and contemporary artificial intelligence.

part on lisp itself, what it makes it special as a computer

list processing, abstracting away details, functions-as-data, eliza, tree-like structure

the socio-historical context

leibniz, first AI dartmouth, SICP, lots of dialects

what that tells us today

??? it’s not so much language dependent as concept independent: the list, the group, which together form a pattern, from the line to the surface

references that people in AI have

• mind/body problem
• the universal language (McCarthy, who made LISP)

bibliography

• cramer, executupable statements
• structure and interpretation of computer programs
• mathematica universalis
• paul graham
• john mccarthy, “Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part I”
• that paper about romanticism
• computer power and human reason
• vilem flusser, line surface
• mccorduck, machines who think