Against Intelligence
About the lecture
Alan Turing’s famous 1950 paper, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, is one of the foundational texts of the discipline of Artificial Intelligence (AI). But what does Turing actually say about intelligence? The surprising answer is - almost nothing. The word ‘intelligence’ occurs only twice in the paper, and ‘intelligent’ only once. So what was Turing really talking about, if not intelligence? And what has this got to do with today’s AI?
Join Professor Tim Crane, a leading British philosopher, as he answers these questions by defending the view that, contrary to what many theorists argue today, the concept of intelligence does not itself refer to a specific cognitive capacity. Instead, it mainly serves as a concept to evaluate and describe cognitive capacities. If this is right, Professor Crane argues the attempt to make progress in AI by replicating human intelligence is misguided, since in a sense there is no such thing to replicate. The fundamental question for AI is not ‘when can AI machines achieve human-level intelligence?’ but rather, ‘what tasks can computers actually perform?’.
In this Barry Taylor and David Lewis Philosophy Lecture, discover Professor Crane’s insights on how the philosophy of AI can help us tackle the real, practical problems that today's AI presents.
This lecture is supported by the Barry Taylor and David Lewis Philosophy Fund, established in memory of Associate Professor Barry Taylor and Princeton Professor David Lewis. Their strong friendship and philosophical disagreements enlivened the work of both. The Barry Taylor and David Lewis Philosophy Fund provides broad based support for the philosophy program at the University of Melbourne, including funding for the annual Barry Taylor and David Lewis Philosophy Lecture.
About the speaker
Professor Tim Crane
Tim Crane is a leading British philosopher of mind. He is Professor of Philosophy at Central European University in Vienna, having previously held the Knightbridge Professorship of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, where he was a Fellow of Peterhouse. Educated at Durham, York and Cambridge (PhD, 1989), he taught for nearly two decades at University College London and was the first Director of the Institute of Philosophy in the University of London. He is a Fellow of Academia Europaea and was President of the Aristotelian Society in 2016–17. His books include The Mechanical Mind, Elements of Mind, The Objects of Thought, Aspects of Psychologism and The Meaning of Belief: Religion from an Atheist’s Point of View. A longtime philosophy consultant editor for the Times Literary Supplement, he writes on intentionality, consciousness and the foundations of mind, and increasingly, on the philosophical questions raised by artificial intelligence.
Further information
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