Would i had him with me always: Affects of longing in early artificial intelligence

ISIS

Volumn 100, Issue 4, 2009, Pages 839-847

  Wilson, Elizabeth A ^a  

^a EMORY UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

AFFECT; ARTICLE; ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE; EMOTION; HISTORY; HUMAN; PHILOSOPHY; RESEARCH; SCIENCE; SEXUAL BEHAVIOR;

AFFECT; ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE; EMOTIONS; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; HUMANS; PHILOSOPHY; RESEARCH; SCIENCE; SEXUAL BEHAVIOR;

EID: 77949290826     PISSN: 00211753     EISSN: 15456994     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/652023     Document Type: Article

References (53)

1. Warren McCulloch to Professor Crane Brinton, Harvard Library, 1 Feb. 1946, Warren S. McCulloch Papers, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, BM139, Series I: Correspondence 1931-1968, Folder "Pitts, Walter." This collection contains a handful of letters from Pitts to McCulloch, and these have been important for the research in this article
2. See also Neil Smalheiser, "Walter Pitts," Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 2000, 43:217-226
3. which is based on interviews with Pitts's friends; and a recent biography of Norbert Wiener by Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, the Father of Cybernetics (New York: Basic, 2004).
4. McCulloch to Rudolf Carnap, 15 Dec. 1955, McCulloch Papers, BM139, Series I: Correspondence 1931-1968, Folder "Pitts, Walter".
5. McCulloch to Brinton, 1 Feb. 1946.
6. See Cynthia Breazeal, Designing Sociable Robots (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002).
7. Rosalind Picard, Affective Computing (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997).
8. Most literatures make important technical distinctions between "affect" and "emotion." Here, for the sake of brevity, I use the words interchangeably. My arguments about early AI are informed by Silvan Tomkins's affect theory: Silvan S. Tomkins, Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, Vols. 1-4 (New York: Springer, 1962-1991).
9. Lucy Suchman, Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Action, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007).
10. For the new scientific focus on emotions see esp. Antonio Damasio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (London: Picador; New York: Avon, 1994).
11. Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ (New York: Bantam, 1995).
12. See http://web.media.mit.edu/̃monster/blendie (accessed 13 May 2009).
13. http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/feralrobots (accessed 13 May 2009).
14. http://www.ace.uci.edu/penny/works/petitmal.html (accessed 13 May 2009).
15. http://cemcom.infosci.cornell.edu/mainsite/projects.php?pid=12 (accessed 13 May 2009).
16. http://www.aurora-project.com (accessed 13 May 2009)
17. Ian Horswill, "Psychopathology, Narrative, and Cognitive Architecture (or, Why AI Characters Should Be Just as Screwed-Up as We Are)," in AAAI Fall Symposium on Intelligent Narrative Technologies, Arlington VA, Nov 9 -11, 2007, pp. 49 -54.
18. Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity," Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics, 1943, 5:115-133.
19. Jerome Lettvin and Pitts, "A Mathematical Theory of the Affective Psychoses," ibid., pp. 139-148.
20. The paper on affective psychoses attempts a mathematical theory of certain severe psychotic states: the circular insanities (what would now be called bipolar disorder), reactive psychoses (brief psychotic episodes, usually triggered by trauma or severe stress), and some kinds of catatonia. It proposes that these states can be described by changes in two variables, "the first representing the level of feeling, affect, or emotion in the organism, and the other the level of activity or conation" (ibid., p. 139).
21. Aside from his published work, most of the available material about Pitts is anecdotal, and much of this has been supplied by Lettvin. See Lettvin, "Warren and Walter," in Collected Works of Warren S. McCulloch, ed. Rook McCulloch (Salinas, Calif.: Intersystems Publications, 1989), Vol.2, pp. 514-529
22. Lettvin, "Jerome Y. Lettvin," in Talking Nets: An Oral History of Neural Networks, ed. James A. Anderson and Edward Rosenfeld (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998), pp. 1-21
23. Lettvin, "Walter Pitts," in The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences, ed. Robert A. Wilson and Frank C. Keil (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), pp. 651-652.
24. Smalheiser, "Walter Pitts" (cit. n. 1), p. 219.
25. That is, these were relationships marked by intense attachment between men ("homo"), and through these bonds important cultural or epistemological spaces ("social") were made possible. "Homosociality" is usually defined in contradistinction to "homosexuality"; the implications of this distinction will be discussed further below. Here I am primarily interested in the affective bonds between the men, although as will become evident these bonds were not indifferent to, or unaffected by, certain sexual conventions. For more information on sexuality and Alan Turing see Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983).
26. Jerry Lettvin to Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, Boston, n.d. (ca. 1942-1943, when Lettvin was studying neurology at Harvard), McCulloch Papers, BM139, Series I: Correspondence 1931-1968, Folder "Pitts, Walter."
27. McCulloch to Pitts, 3 Sept. 1948, McCulloch Papers, BM139, Series III: Reminiscences of McCulloch 1968-1974, Box "Ka-V," Folder "Personal-W. Pitts".
28. Lettvin, "Jerome Y. Lettvin" (cit. n. 6). Fifty years later, Lettvin spoke very fondly of their domestic arrangement in New York: "Now this [Walter shifting to MIT] was a wonderful thing. When Walter moves to work with Wiener everything is quite nice, except now I have to go off to the wars. After basic training in \ January of 1944, I have to report to New York, Bellevue Hospital, for a few months training in neuropsychiatry. Walter at this time is hired by Kellex Corporation [in New York], which is part of the Atomic Energy Project. They're over in the Woolworth Building, and so we move to New York together. We take a room together in the Village. He goes in the morning to Kellex, I go over to Bellevue, but meanwhile we're having a ball." Ibid., p. 4.
29. McCulloch to Carnap, 15 Dec. 1955 (cit. n. 2).
30. McCulloch to Dr. Henry Allen Moe [John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation], 30 Dec. 1959, McCulloch Papers, BM139, Series I: Correspondence 1931-1968, Folder "Pitts, Walter".
31. McCulloch to Brinton, 1 Feb. 1946 (cit. n. 1).
32. Lettvin, "Jerome Y. Lettvin" (cit. n. 6), p. 4 (Wiener "desolate").
33. Lettvin, "Warren and Walter" (cit. n. 6), p. 516 (promoting Pitts)
34. Conway and Siegelman, Dark Hero of the Information Age (cit. n. 1) (Rosenbleuth).
35. Steve Heims, The Cybernetics Group (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991).
36. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1985).
37. Manuel Blum, "Notes on McCulloch-Pitts' 'A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity,'" in Collected Works of Warren S. McCulloch, ed. R. McCulloch (cit. n. 6), Vol.1, pp. 339-340, on p. 339.
38. On the identity of "Bert" see Smalheiser, "Walter Pitts" (cit. n. 1), p. 219.
39. I italicized "in a park." Both manuscripts were held at the American Philosophical Society, Warren S. McCulloch Papers (BM139, Series IV: Reminiscences of McCulloch 1968-1974, Box 1 "A-D," Folder "Blum, Manuel") but have been removed. Copies are available from the author (Elizabeth A. Wilson).
40. Lettvin, e.g., describes Pitts as "in a sense almost pure thought, thought personified": Lettvin, "Jerome Y. Lettvin" (cit. n. 6), p. 9.
41. Alan Mathieson Turing Papers, Modern Archive Centre, Kings College, Cambridge, AMT A/13.
42. In 1952, Turing was arrested on charges of sexual misconduct following the burglary of his house. In the documentary The Strange Life and Death of Dr. Turing (Christopher Sykes Productions, 1992), Shaun Wylie, one of Turing's colleagues, reports that Turing carried around the legal documents relating to his arrest in a folder entitled "Burglary & Buggery.".
43. See Elizabeth A. Wilson, "Imaginable Computers: Affects and Intelligence in Alan Turing," in Prefiguring Cyberculture: An Intellectual History, ed. Darren Tofts, Annemarie Jonson, and Alessio Cavallaro (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), pp. 38-51, for an analysis of how these interests might be excavated from Turing's work. For the faulty syllogism see Turing Papers, AMT D/14a.
44. This argument is pursued in more detail in Elizabeth A. Wilson, "Affect, Artificial Intelligence, and Internal Space," Emotion, Space, and Society, 2008, 1:22-27.
45. On the atmosphere at the McCullochs' house see Conway and Siegelman, Dark Hero of the Information Age (cit. n. 1).
46. Michael Arbib, "Warren McCulloch's Search for the Logic of the Nervous System," Perspect. Biol. Med., 2000, 43:193-216.
47. Lettvin, "Walter Pitts" (cit. n. 6).
48. Conway and Siegelman, Dark Hero of the Information Age (cit. n. 1).
49. Lettvin, "Jerome Y. Lettvin" (cit. n. 6), p. 9
50. Lettvin, "Warren and Walter" (cit. n. 6), p. 521.
51. Smalheiser, "Walter Pitts" (cit. n. 1).
52. Arbib, "Warren McCulloch's Search for the Logic of the Nervous System" (cit. n. 20).
53. Lettvin, "Walter Pitts" (cit. n. 6).