Article Commentary: The two kinds of artificial intelligence, or how not to confuse objects and subjects

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a research pursuit that appears ideally suited to Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, given the ambition of AI to advance both the scientific study of humanity, and of computational machines as a “science of the artificial” (Simon 1969). The first of these aspires to self-knowledge (that is, the study of ourselves as subjects), while the second has become associated with mechanical and quantified objectivity (Blackwell 2022). These alternative perspectives are not easily reconciled, and in this essay, I will argue that AI research has not paid sufficient attention to the implications of these distinct disciplinary perspectives. In particular, I will argue that many popular commentators on AI, including journalists, investors and philosophers, have spent insufficient time understanding the mechanical ambitions of what AI engineers actually create. This argument is complementary to that advanced by Philip Agre, in his own Notes on Trying to Reform AI (1997), where he observed that AI researchers were engineers engaged in covert philosophy. Agre proposed that those philosophical ambitions should become more overt, advocating a critical technical practice. The consequence of insufficient understanding across disciplines, as criticised by both Agre and myself, has been to muddle together subjective and objective questions.