# HG changeset patch # User Henry S Thompson # Date 1732357137 0 # Node ID ca638eb2bfebf806812c5a0ffa9281cd6faa427b # Parent 44101e652fa3e56d20a4732834969251c2ee276f to GroupOfN for review diff -r 44101e652fa3 -r ca638eb2bfeb CR_manuscript/foreword.docx Binary file CR_manuscript/foreword.docx has changed diff -r 44101e652fa3 -r ca638eb2bfeb CR_manuscript/foreword.txt --- /dev/null Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000 +++ b/CR_manuscript/foreword.txt Sat Nov 23 10:18:57 2024 +0000 @@ -0,0 +1,179 @@ +*Foreword* + +Brian Cantwell Smith was born in Montreal, Canada, on 1 December 1949. +Growing up first there and later in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he +remains a Canadian citizen. Multiple allegiances, sometimes +conflicting but mostly complementary, have characterized both his +personal and intellectual life ever since. + +He started undergraduate study at Oberlin College in Ohio in 1967, +where his interests included both physics and religion but left after +only two years, travelling first to visit the Quaker community +Argenta, British Columbia, and ending up in Ottawa where he started +work as a programmer at the Division of Physics laboratory of the +National Research Council of Canada, working on a project jointly +involving Fermilab in Chicago and the Lawrence Research Laboratory in +Berkeley. Working at all three sites on PDP 9 and PDP 15 +microcomputers, he "programmed like crazy" in machine language, +building systems for experimental control and data gathering. + +When the project ended Brian moved back to the family home in +Cambridge, and started taking classes at the Massachusetts Institute +of Technology (MIT), studying what was then known as Social Inquiry, +in particular the politics of high technology. But it quickly became +apparent that the understanding of computing that the social +scientists were critiquing was not the computing that he knew as a +programmer, what he later came to refer to as "computing in the wild". + +"What drove me out of Social Inquiry and back to [Computer Science] was +needing to be back in the practice. That skill was not somthing that +people on the outside understood." + +Brian had realised that in order to legitimately critique Computer +Science, he needed to get clear on what computing really is: "I had to +go into the heart of the beast, as it were". So he applied for the PhD +program in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and +began taking classes there. + +When the MIT administration discovered Brian didn't have an +undergraduate degree, and so couldn't be registered for graduate +study, Patrick Winston, the newly-appointed head of the Artificial +Intelligence Laboratory, gave Brian an informal oral exam in topics +from the MIT undergraduate computer science curriculum and awarded him +the credits necessary for a degree, clearing the way for his admission +to the graduate program. + +In 1976 Terry Winograd, who had left MIT to join the Computer Science +Lab at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), invited Brian to +spend the summer in the Understander Group there, where he joined in +the development of KRL, a Knowledge Representation Language, which +came to embody some of the ideas that were developed in his Masters +and PhD dissertations [refs]. + +These biographical details bring us to the brink of Brian's +professional life, and to the time and place where we first met. The +point made above about multiple allegiances can be succinctly +summarized by a list of the positions he has occupied since the +completion of his PhD a few years later: + + * Member of the Scientific Staff, Xerox PARC + * Director, Xerox PARC System Sciences Lab + * Adjunct Professor of Philosophy, Stanford University + * Founding member of Stanford University's Center for the Study of + Language and Information + * Founding member and first president, Computer Professionals for + Social Responsibility + * President of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology + * Professor of Cognitive Science, Computer Science, and Philosophy, + Indiana University + * Kimberly J. Jenkins University Distinguished Professor of + Philosophy and New Technologies, Duke University + * Dean of the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto + * Invited keynote speaker, _Défaire l'Occident_, Plainartige, France + * Professor of Information, Philosophy, Cognitive Science, and the + History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of + Toronto + * Senior Fellow, Massey College, University of Toronto + * Reid Hoffman Professor of Artificial Intelligence and the Human, + University of Toronto + +It was during Brian's years in Palo Alto at PARC, at first just for +the summer and then full-time, that the foundations were laid for the +work that led to this book. + + "As an exercise in using KRL representational structures, Brian + Smith tried to describe the KRL data structures themselves in + KRL-0. A brief sketch was completed, and in doing it we were made + much more aware of the ways in which the language was inconsistent + and irregular. This initial sketch was the basis for much of the + development in KRL-1." [ref. Bobrow and Winograd 1978, "Experience + with KRL-O: One Cycle of a Knowledge Representation Language", in + _Proceedings of the Fifth International Joint Conference on + Artificial Intelligence_, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Burlington, + MA. Available online at + https://www.ijcai.org/Proceedings/77-1/Papers/032.pdf]. + +Brian's input into the (never completed) KRL-1 meant that not only +could some parts of a system's data be _about_ other parts, but that +this would be more than just commentary. It would actually play a role +in the system's operation. For KRL-1, this was initially motivated by +a desire to formulate aspects of knowledge representation such as +negation and disjunction as, if you will, knowledge about knowledge, +rather than as primitives built into the vocabulary of the +representation language itself. [elaborate this with reference to +old-style Semantic Nets and Bobrow and Norman ?] + +Brian's development of this idea, which he termed 'reflection', is +documented in the papers gathered in _Legacy_. But its title +notwithstanding, this book is _not_ a recapitulation of that work. + +There was an assumption at the heart of Brian's reflective +architectures, which was initially expected to occupy just one section +of one chapter of his PhD, as signalled in its preliminary outline +Table of Contents. But its resolution proved to be much more +problematic than expected, to the extent that it has taken +a lifetime of work for Brian to bring it clearly into focus. + +Looking back it seems that this difficulty acted rather like the grit +in the oyster, stimulating Brian's wholesale reconsideration of the +nature of computation, and Computer Science as currently practiced, +which _is_ what this book is about. + +You'll have to read the book to find out what that assumption was, and +the details of the critique of Computer Science that it led Brian to. + +It may seem rather presumptuous of me to suggest that this one person +has accurately diagnosed a problem that a whole field of enquiry has +missed, to the point where they've ended up altogether stuck, unable +to see what they've missed. The point of the list offered above of +Brian's achievements and the manifest breadth of his background it +testifies to will I hope give sufficient grounds for suggesting that +it is at least possible that this indeed just might be worth checking +out. + +As Brian himself said about this recently "That this is important +needs to be said. And it's not about _me_, that is, it's not +important because I say it is." That it's important to him does +however mean that his claim deserves our attention. + +This is not an easy book to read, but it's a very important book, so +it's worth the effort. As Brian himself has said, it's written rather +like a detective story, in which the same underlying set of facts is +explored repeatedly, getting closer each time to a complete and +self-consistent picture. When I first read it, I said to Brian more +than once "But you keeping using [some term], and it's clear you mean +it in some important, technical, sense, but you haven't _defined_ it". +And he said, "Look, what I've writen should be read more like novel +than like a manual. What things mean will gradually take shape. Be +patient". + +If you care about computer science, either as a practioner, or a +theorist, or a concerned citizen, this book matters for you. It's +conclusions matter, even if parts of it are not meant for you. So +even if you find it hard, as a computer programmer, to see why you +should care if the theorists have got it wrong, be patient. If you're +a theorist, and you find Brian's critique at best irrelevant, and at +worst aggresive, obnoxius and founded in misunderstanding, be patient. +If you're a citizen, and the technical details are off-putting, be +patient. + +If you _are_ patient, and stay the course, when you get to the end you +will realise that you actually do understand the terminology now, and +that even though the work that remains is hugely challenging, and +perhaps only imperfectly grasped by Brian himself, much less the rest +of us, getting it done matters for all of us. As practioners and +theorists, we need to ask ourselves what we can do to make Brian's +vision a reality. As citizens, we need to cheer from the sidelines, +and keep asking questions. We owe him that much. + +Henry S. Thompson, Toronto and Edinburgh, November 2024. + +*Epigraph* + + Therefore, I close with the following dramatic but also perfectly + serious claim: cognitive science and artificial intelligence cannot + succeed in their own essential aims unless and until they can + understand and/or implement genuine freedom and the capacity to + love. + + John Haugeland, "Authentic Intentionality", 2002