AGRE%OZ.AI.MIT.EDU@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU (03/05/86)
Artificial Intelligence Seminar Monday, March 10, 2:30pm 545 Technology Square (MIT Building NE43) 7th Floor Playroom WHY YOU SHOULD READ BEING AND TIME Hubert L. Dreyfus Philosophy Department UC Berkeley The beauty of artificial intelligence is that computation keeps you honest: mistaken approaches will simply fail. I will argue that a diagnosis of current difficulties in AI research can be found in the work of Martin Heidegger. Heidegger's Being and Time isolates a number of assumptions of Western philosophy which, though subtle and pervasive, are contradicted by a careful account of the phenomenology of everyday activity. These assumptions and their corollaries have been implicit (and sometimes explicit) in most AI work since the field's beginnings. The task now is to find a positive alternative. I will start by presenting some of the basic concepts of Heidegger's phenomenology. But Heidegger's account of everyday practices does not directly provide an alternative to traditional methods in AI because it offers a description rather than a mechanizable explanation. It is difficult to reason about the ways descriptions and explanations constrain one another. Still, I will attempt a start by outlining the virtues and failings of some new approaches, in particular those of the connectionist movement.