This article reconfigures the history of artificial intelligence (AI) and its accompanying tradition of criticism by excavating the work of Mortimer Taube, a pioneer in information and library sciences, whose magnum opus, Computers and Common Sense: The Myth of Thinking Machines (1961), has been mostly forgotten. To convey the essence of his distinctive critique, the article focuses on Taube's attack on the general problem solver (GPS), the second major AI program. After examining his analysis of the social construction of this and other “thinking machines,” it concludes that, despite technical changes in AI, much of Taube's criticism remains relevant today. Moreover, his status as an “information processing” insider who criticized AI on behalf of the public good challenges the boundaries and focus of most critiques of AI from the past half-century. In sum, Taube's work offers an alternative model from which contemporary AI workers and critics can learn much.

中文翻译：

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“一般问题解决者”不存在：莫蒂默·陶伯（Mertimer Taube）和AI批评艺术

本文通过挖掘信息和图书馆科学领域的先驱Mortimer Taube的著作，重新构造了人工智能（AI）的历史及其伴随的批评传统，他的著作《计算机与常识：思维机器的神话》（1961年）大获成功。 ，已被大多数人遗忘。为了传达他独特的评论的精髓，本文重点介绍Taube对第二个主要的AI程序通用问题解决程序（GPS）的攻击。在检查了他对这种“思维机器”和其他“思维机器”的社会建构的分析之后，得出的结论是，尽管AI技术发生了变化，但Taube的许多批评在今天仍然有意义。而且，他作为“信息处理”内部人的身份代表公共利益批评AI，这挑战了过去半个世纪以来大多数AI批评的界限和重点。总而言之，Taube的工作提供了一种替代模型，当代AI工作者和评论家可以从中学到很多东西。