'... in one case [the machine] created a beautifully simple proof to replace a far more complex one in [Principia]. ... T I am not sure that these facts should be made known to schoolboys. You may also be interested in the evidence of our paper that the learned man and the wise man are not always the same person....'
Dear Professor Simon, (September 21, 1957)
... I quite appreciate your reasons for thinking that the facts should be concealed from schoolboys. How can one expect them to learn to do sums when they know that machines can do them better? I am also delighted by your exact demonstration of the old saw that wisdom is not the same thing as erudition.
Yours sincerely
Bertrand Russell
Source: Dear Bertrand Russell, 1969
More info.: https://russell-j.com/beginner/DBR4-45.HTM
More info.: https://russell-j.com/beginner/DBR4-05.HTM
* a brief commnet:
The original text by Russell only mentions Prof. Simon. Assuming he must have been a prominent figure in computer science, I searched on Google. The fact that Russell's reply was written in 1957, when he was 85 years old, also served as a clue.
First, I suspected that it might be Professor Herbert Simon (1916?2001). According to Wikipedia, Professor Simon was an American political scientist, cognitive psychologist, management scientist, and information scientist. He even won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1978, showing how broad his range of research truly was.
Looking at his biography, I found the entry “In 1955, he became a professor of computer science and psychology at Carnegie Mellon University,” which made me almost certain. My suspicion was fully confirmed when I found the following description on the Japanese Wikipedia page for Logic Theorist:
“Logic Theorist was a computer program developed by Allen Newell, Herbert Simon, and J. C. Shaw between 1955 and 1956. It was intentionally designed to mimic human problem-solving abilities and is regarded as the world's first artificial intelligence program. It proved 38 of the first 52 theorems in Whitehead and Russell’s Principia Mathematica, and in some cases, even discovered new and more elegant proofs.”
This correspondence also marked the moment when Russell himself, at the age of 85, realized that artificial intelligence was beginning to approach human intellectual activity.
Incidentally, I also discovered that Professor Herbert Simon gave a lecture titled The Birth of Cognitive Science at Keio University’s Mita Campus in 1979 (with Yuichiro Anzai, who later became the president of Keio, serving as the moderator). The lecture is quite fascinating, so I encourage anyone interested to read it: https://www.mita-hyoron.keio.ac.jp/foreign-visitors/201706-1.html
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