AI systems can be found in the smartphone in your pocket and are becoming increasingly important – and ever more powerful – in our day-to-day lives. It's a theme we have previously explored in the article AI Is All Around Us. And in the article AI – Two Letters, Many Meanings, we clarified that these kinds of systems are also referred to as narrow AI. Narrow AI systems are very specialized – hence they are very efficient in performing the tasks for which they are designed, easily outperforming humans in doing so. However, these systems fail to solve problems outside of their assigned functionality, and struggle to transfer knowledge from one field to another.

Aaron Sloman was teaching philosophy at the University of Sussex in 1969, when he met Max Clowes. Clowes had done pioneering work in computer image interpretation. Now, he was asking Sloman to drop the way he learned to do philosophy at Oxford and to start studying artificial intelligence instead. Nine years later, Sloman published em The Computer Revolution in Philosophy /em, in which he extolled AI's power to extend our ability to think. He's been examining the "deep continuity" between AI and very old problems in philosophy ever since.