Artificial Intelligence, Acute Interpretative Flexibility, and the Pursuit of Closure Mechanisms: Considering a 1984 Debate in The Listener Magazine

In order to explore the limits associated with computational modes of thinking, this article turns back to a 1984 debate that occurred in the pages of The Listener magazine. It takes as its focus the 25 letters and other discussion articles published during and immediately following John Searle's 1984 Reith Lectures on “Minds, Brains, and Science.” By focusing on the debate surrounding those lectures, the article develops a snapshot of a particular moment and uses this to think about the way that the limits of AI were being imagined at the time. The analysis illustrates the development of three key themes within these imagined limits of computational thinking. The first concerns the sensitivity to the surroundings and the ability to produce variable responses. The second focuses on the imagined mental states of these systems. Finally, the third is concerned with the limits of understanding, and how these are associated with human qualities such as emotion, meaning, and a sense of self. Taken together, these features of the 1984 debate reveal aspects of the conditions of AI's development whilst also being suggestive of how ideas around AI have taken form, shaping both the development of AI and critical responses to it. The article revisits and adapts Pinch and Bijker's classic work on the social construction of technology to suggest, in contrast to their accounts of the stabilisation of technologies, that AI's particularly acute “interpretative flexibility” means it is a technology locked in an unresolvable pursuit of “closure mechanisms.”