Artificial Intelligence and Wittgenstein

The association of Wittgenstein’s name with the notion of artificial intelligence is bound
to cause some surprise both to Wittgensteinians and to people interested in artificial
intelligence. After all, Wittgenstein died in 1951 and the term artificial intelligence didn’t
come into use until 1956 so that it seems unlikely that one could have anything to do
with the other. However, establishing a connection between Wittgenstein and artificial
intelligence is not as insuperable a problem as it might appear at first glance. While it is
true that artificial intelligence as a quasi-distinct discipline is of recent vintage, some of its
concerns, especially those of a philosophical nature, have been around for quite some
time. At the birth of modern philosophy we find Descartes wondering whether it would
be possible to create a machine that would be phenomenologically indistinguishable from man.