The Simon Newcomb Awards

We have decided to give an award for the silliest arguments against AI published each year. The Simon Newcomb Awards, as they are called, will be announced here in the AI Magazine. Winners will be presented with a small statue (informally referred to as a'Simon') in a short ceremony at a suitable national gathering. We invite nominations for future awards. He combined a solid confidence in his own reasoning with a disdain for practical experiments. In many ways his arguments are similar to recent attacks on AI. They are short, elegant, convincing to his contemporaries, utterly wrong, and wonderfully silly, displaying an appealing mixture of partial insight with a failure to really comprehend what he was talking about. For example, there was the Stopping Problem argument. "Imagine the proud possessor of the aeroplane," suggested Newcomb sarcastically, "darting through the air at a speed of several hundred feet per second! It is the speed alone that sustains him. How is he ever going to stop?" (Newcomb, 1901). Newcomb intended his question rhetorically, but as everyone now knows, it has a perfectly good answer: "Very carefully." The Simon Newcomb Award will be given in recognition of a similarly silly published argument against AI, especially when the writer's confidence in his views seems to arise from his ignorance of the subject. The ideal candidate is an eminent scientist or scholar in some other field -- for example, a philosopher, sociologist or mathematician -- who clearly fails to grok some basic idea of computer science. While any published argument may be nominated for the prize, the committee gives highest credit to arguments which are not just idiotic, but which use some technical issue in a way that displays some, but not enough, insight. Some argument forms are already judged unacceptable, includthan they are now, or that people would be somehow reduced in status. The award is to be given for a specific argument, so that (just as with the Academy awards) a true star might receive a'Simon' for each of several outstanding performances. We also expect to award the occasional'Lifetime Achievement Award' in recognition of an entire career of silly attacks on the subject. Popular nominees (those supported by several submissions) will be announced at the same time as the Award winners. Those who are nominated but not selected for an Award may take solace in knowing that the nomination itself is a high honor. The nominees for the first Simon Newcomb Award were, Selmer Bringsjord, Harry Collins, Hubert Dreyfus, Gerald Edelman, Walter Freeman, Roger Penrose, Joseph Rychlak, John Searle, and Maurice Wilkes. In the future, only one award will normally be made each year, but for this inaugural occasion, we are proud to announce four winners, in alphabetical order.