The Soviet scientific programme on AI: if a machine cannot ‘think’, can it ‘control’?

Author:

Kirtchik Olessia

Abstract

AbstractThis article analyses the intellectual and institutional development of the artificial-intelligence (AI) research programme within the Soviet Academy of Sciences from the 1970s to the 1980s. Considering the places and ideas from which it borrowed, I contextualize its goals and projects as part of a larger technoscientific movement aimed at rationalizing Soviet governance, and unpack shared epistemological and cultural assumptions. By tracing their origins to debates accompanying the introduction of cybernetics into Soviet intellectual and political life in the 1950s and early 1960s, I show how Soviet conceptions of ‘thinking machines’ interacted with dialectical materialism and communist socio-technical imaginaries of governance and control. The programme of ‘situational management’ developed by Dmitry Pospelov helps explain the resulting conception of AI as control systems aimed at solving complex tasks that cannot be fully formalized and therefore require new modelling methods to represent real-world situations. This specific orientation can be understood, on the one hand, as a research programme competing with systems analysis and economic cybernetics to rationalize Soviet management, and, on the other hand, as a field trying to demarcate itself from a purely statistical or mathematical approach to modelling cognitive processes.

Publisher

Cambridge University Press (CUP)

Subject

General Medicine

Cited by 2 articles. 订阅此论文施引文献 订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献

同舟云学术

1.学者识别学者识别

2.学术分析学术分析

3.人才评估人才评估

"同舟云学术"是以全球学者为主线,采集、加工和组织学术论文而形成的新型学术文献查询和分析系统,可以对全球学者进行文献检索和人才价值评估。用户可以通过关注某些学科领域的顶尖人物而持续追踪该领域的学科进展和研究前沿。经过近期的数据扩容,当前同舟云学术共收录了国内外主流学术期刊6万余种,收集的期刊论文及会议论文总量共计约1.5亿篇,并以每天添加12000余篇中外论文的速度递增。我们也可以为用户提供个性化、定制化的学者数据。欢迎来电咨询!咨询电话:010-8811{复制后删除}0370

www.globalauthorid.com

TOP

Copyright © 2019-2024 北京同舟云网络信息技术有限公司
京公网安备11010802033243号  京ICP备18003416号-3