AI's practices of formalizing and "working out" an idea constitute a powerful method of inquiry, but precisely for this reason they are also a powerful way to force an idea's internal tensions to the surface through prolonged technical frustrations: excessive complexity, intractable inefficiency, difficulties in "scaling up" to realistic problems, and so forth. These patterns of frustration have helped clear the ground for a new conception of technical work, one that recognizes the numerous, deep continuities between AI and the humanities. Although these continuities reach into the full range of humanistic inquiry, I will restrict myself here to the following five assertions about AI and its relationship to philosophy:
1. AI ideas have their genealogical roots in philosophical ideas.
2. AI research programs attempt to work out and develop the philosophical systems they inherit.
3. AI research regularly encounters difficulties and impasses that derive from internal tensions in the underlying philosophical systems.
4. These difficulties and impasses should be embraced as particularly informative clues about the nature and consequences of the philosophical tensions that generate them.
5. Analysis of these clues must proceed outside the bounds of strictly technical research, but they can result in both new technical agendas and in revised understandings of technical research itself.
In short, AI is philosophy underneath.
