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author Henry S Thompson <ht@inf.ed.ac.uk>
date Sat, 23 Nov 2024 10:18:57 +0000
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1 *Foreword*
2
3 Brian Cantwell Smith was born in Montreal, Canada, on 1 December 1949.
4 Growing up first there and later in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he
5 remains a Canadian citizen. Multiple allegiances, sometimes
6 conflicting but mostly complementary, have characterized both his
7 personal and intellectual life ever since.
8
9 He started undergraduate study at Oberlin College in Ohio in 1967,
10 where his interests included both physics and religion but left after
11 only two years, travelling first to visit the Quaker community
12 Argenta, British Columbia, and ending up in Ottawa where he started
13 work as a programmer at the Division of Physics laboratory of the
14 National Research Council of Canada, working on a project jointly
15 involving Fermilab in Chicago and the Lawrence Research Laboratory in
16 Berkeley. Working at all three sites on PDP 9 and PDP 15
17 microcomputers, he "programmed like crazy" in machine language,
18 building systems for experimental control and data gathering.
19
20 When the project ended Brian moved back to the family home in
21 Cambridge, and started taking classes at the Massachusetts Institute
22 of Technology (MIT), studying what was then known as Social Inquiry,
23 in particular the politics of high technology. But it quickly became
24 apparent that the understanding of computing that the social
25 scientists were critiquing was not the computing that he knew as a
26 programmer, what he later came to refer to as "computing in the wild".
27
28 "What drove me out of Social Inquiry and back to [Computer Science] was
29 needing to be back in the practice. That skill was not somthing that
30 people on the outside understood."
31
32 Brian had realised that in order to legitimately critique Computer
33 Science, he needed to get clear on what computing really is: "I had to
34 go into the heart of the beast, as it were". So he applied for the PhD
35 program in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and
36 began taking classes there.
37
38 When the MIT administration discovered Brian didn't have an
39 undergraduate degree, and so couldn't be registered for graduate
40 study, Patrick Winston, the newly-appointed head of the Artificial
41 Intelligence Laboratory, gave Brian an informal oral exam in topics
42 from the MIT undergraduate computer science curriculum and awarded him
43 the credits necessary for a degree, clearing the way for his admission
44 to the graduate program.
45
46 In 1976 Terry Winograd, who had left MIT to join the Computer Science
47 Lab at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), invited Brian to
48 spend the summer in the Understander Group there, where he joined in
49 the development of KRL, a Knowledge Representation Language, which
50 came to embody some of the ideas that were developed in his Masters
51 and PhD dissertations [refs].
52
53 These biographical details bring us to the brink of Brian's
54 professional life, and to the time and place where we first met. The
55 point made above about multiple allegiances can be succinctly
56 summarized by a list of the positions he has occupied since the
57 completion of his PhD a few years later:
58
59 * Member of the Scientific Staff, Xerox PARC
60 * Director, Xerox PARC System Sciences Lab
61 * Adjunct Professor of Philosophy, Stanford University
62 * Founding member of Stanford University's Center for the Study of
63 Language and Information
64 * Founding member and first president, Computer Professionals for
65 Social Responsibility
66 * President of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology
67 * Professor of Cognitive Science, Computer Science, and Philosophy,
68 Indiana University
69 * Kimberly J. Jenkins University Distinguished Professor of
70 Philosophy and New Technologies, Duke University
71 * Dean of the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto
72 * Invited keynote speaker, _Défaire l'Occident_, Plainartige, France
73 * Professor of Information, Philosophy, Cognitive Science, and the
74 History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of
75 Toronto
76 * Senior Fellow, Massey College, University of Toronto
77 * Reid Hoffman Professor of Artificial Intelligence and the Human,
78 University of Toronto
79
80 It was during Brian's years in Palo Alto at PARC, at first just for
81 the summer and then full-time, that the foundations were laid for the
82 work that led to this book.
83
84 "As an exercise in using KRL representational structures, Brian
85 Smith tried to describe the KRL data structures themselves in
86 KRL-0. A brief sketch was completed, and in doing it we were made
87 much more aware of the ways in which the language was inconsistent
88 and irregular. This initial sketch was the basis for much of the
89 development in KRL-1." [ref. Bobrow and Winograd 1978, "Experience
90 with KRL-O: One Cycle of a Knowledge Representation Language", in
91 _Proceedings of the Fifth International Joint Conference on
92 Artificial Intelligence_, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Burlington,
93 MA. Available online at
94 https://www.ijcai.org/Proceedings/77-1/Papers/032.pdf].
95
96 Brian's input into the (never completed) KRL-1 meant that not only
97 could some parts of a system's data be _about_ other parts, but that
98 this would be more than just commentary. It would actually play a role
99 in the system's operation. For KRL-1, this was initially motivated by
100 a desire to formulate aspects of knowledge representation such as
101 negation and disjunction as, if you will, knowledge about knowledge,
102 rather than as primitives built into the vocabulary of the
103 representation language itself. [elaborate this with reference to
104 old-style Semantic Nets and Bobrow and Norman ?]
105
106 Brian's development of this idea, which he termed 'reflection', is
107 documented in the papers gathered in _Legacy_. But its title
108 notwithstanding, this book is _not_ a recapitulation of that work.
109
110 There was an assumption at the heart of Brian's reflective
111 architectures, which was initially expected to occupy just one section
112 of one chapter of his PhD, as signalled in its preliminary outline
113 Table of Contents. But its resolution proved to be much more
114 problematic than expected, to the extent that it has taken
115 a lifetime of work for Brian to bring it clearly into focus.
116
117 Looking back it seems that this difficulty acted rather like the grit
118 in the oyster, stimulating Brian's wholesale reconsideration of the
119 nature of computation, and Computer Science as currently practiced,
120 which _is_ what this book is about.
121
122 You'll have to read the book to find out what that assumption was, and
123 the details of the critique of Computer Science that it led Brian to.
124
125 It may seem rather presumptuous of me to suggest that this one person
126 has accurately diagnosed a problem that a whole field of enquiry has
127 missed, to the point where they've ended up altogether stuck, unable
128 to see what they've missed. The point of the list offered above of
129 Brian's achievements and the manifest breadth of his background it
130 testifies to will I hope give sufficient grounds for suggesting that
131 it is at least possible that this indeed just might be worth checking
132 out.
133
134 As Brian himself said about this recently "That this is important
135 needs to be said. And it's not about _me_, that is, it's not
136 important because I say it is." That it's important to him does
137 however mean that his claim deserves our attention.
138
139 This is not an easy book to read, but it's a very important book, so
140 it's worth the effort. As Brian himself has said, it's written rather
141 like a detective story, in which the same underlying set of facts is
142 explored repeatedly, getting closer each time to a complete and
143 self-consistent picture. When I first read it, I said to Brian more
144 than once "But you keeping using [some term], and it's clear you mean
145 it in some important, technical, sense, but you haven't _defined_ it".
146 And he said, "Look, what I've writen should be read more like novel
147 than like a manual. What things mean will gradually take shape. Be
148 patient".
149
150 If you care about computer science, either as a practioner, or a
151 theorist, or a concerned citizen, this book matters for you. It's
152 conclusions matter, even if parts of it are not meant for you. So
153 even if you find it hard, as a computer programmer, to see why you
154 should care if the theorists have got it wrong, be patient. If you're
155 a theorist, and you find Brian's critique at best irrelevant, and at
156 worst aggresive, obnoxius and founded in misunderstanding, be patient.
157 If you're a citizen, and the technical details are off-putting, be
158 patient.
159
160 If you _are_ patient, and stay the course, when you get to the end you
161 will realise that you actually do understand the terminology now, and
162 that even though the work that remains is hugely challenging, and
163 perhaps only imperfectly grasped by Brian himself, much less the rest
164 of us, getting it done matters for all of us. As practioners and
165 theorists, we need to ask ourselves what we can do to make Brian's
166 vision a reality. As citizens, we need to cheer from the sidelines,
167 and keep asking questions. We owe him that much.
168
169 Henry S. Thompson, Toronto and Edinburgh, November 2024.
170
171 *Epigraph*
172
173 Therefore, I close with the following dramatic but also perfectly
174 serious claim: cognitive science and artificial intelligence cannot
175 succeed in their own essential aims unless and until they can
176 understand and/or implement genuine freedom and the capacity to
177 love.
178
179 John Haugeland, "Authentic Intentionality", 2002