The Arrival of Artificial Intelligence

The history of computers is often told as a history of objects, from the abacus to the Babbage engine up through the code-breaking machines of World War II. In fact, it is better understood as a history of ideas, mainly ideas that emerged from mathematical logic, an obscure and cult-like discipline that first developed in the 19th century. Mathematical logic was pioneered by philosopher-mathematicians, most notably George Boole and Gottlob Frege, who were themselves inspired by Leibniz's dream of a universal "concept language," and the ancient logical system of Aristotle. Dixon goes on to describe the creation of Boolean logic (which has only two variables: TRUE and FALSE, represented as 1 and 0 respectively), and the insight by Claude E. Shannon that those two variables could be represented by a circuit, which itself has only two states: open and closed.1 Dixon writes: Another way to characterize Shannon's achievement is that he was first to distinguish between the logical and the physical layer of computers. Dixon is being modest: the distinction may be obvious to computer scientists, but it is precisely the clear articulation of said distinction that undergirds Dixon's remarkable essay; obviously "computers" as popularly conceptualized were not invented by Aristotle, but he created the means by which they would work (or, more accurately, set humanity down that path).