Artificial Experts: Social Knowledge and Intelligent Machines (Inside Technology) - Softcover

Collins, Harry

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0262531151 ISBN 13: 9780262531153

Publisher: MIT Press, 1992

Synopsis

In Artificial Experts, Collins explains what computers can't do, but he also studies the ordinary and extraordinary things that they can do. He argues that the machines we create are limited because we cannot reproduce in symbols what every community knows, yet we give our machines abilities by the way we embed them in our society. He unfolds a compelling account of the difference between human action and machine intelligence, the core of which is a witty and learned explanation of knowledge itself, of what communities know and the ways in which they know it.

About this title

About the Author

Harry Collins is Distinguished Research Professor of Sociology and Director of the Centre for the Study of Knowledge, Expertise, and Science at Cardiff University. A Fellow of the British Academy, he is the author of Gravity's Shadow; Gravity's Ghost; Gravity's Ghost and Big Dog; Gravity's Kiss: The Detection of Gravitational Waves (MIT Press); and many other books.

Review

Collins is a master of the new sociology of science, which watches science as it actually works. Artificial Experts is his masterpiece. Witty, readable, and wise, it introduces the fields of artificial intelligence and the sociology of science to each other and to the outsider. It shows what we do with tools and what they do to us.―Donald McCloskey, Author of If You're So Smart: The Narrative of Economic Expertise, Professor of Economics and of History, University of Iowa (Endorsement)

This work significantly advances the debate over machine versus human intelligence. It puts a new twist on the old question of what computers can't do, by asking instead how it is that they are able to do those things that they can do. The answer according to Collins is that intelligent machines work in virtue of their use by socialized human beings.―Dr. Lucy Suchman, System Sciences Labratory, Xerox Palo Alto Reaearch Center (Endorsement)

One of Collin's main contributions to the sociology of scientific knowledge is to stress (following Wittengenstein, Winch, Polyani et al.) the tacit element in scientific knowledge and technical skill, and to draw out the implications of this insight. It is an invaluable and powerful point, with wide-ranging ramifications.―David Edge, Director, Science Studies Unit, University of Edinburgh (Endorsement)

This book is intended for AI researchers and practitioners as well as sociologists... H. M. Collins makes his case without the polemical excesses of Hubert Dreyfus or John Searle. Unlike them, he seems to have genuinely attempted an experiment in knowledge engineering.―Kamesh Ramakrishna, IEEE Expert (Endorsement)

Edition details

• Publisher: MIT Press
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0262531151
• ISBN 13: 9780262531153
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 280