The Question of Artificial Intelligence: Philosophical and Sociological Perspectives

Originally published in 1987 when Artificial Intelligence (AI) was one of the most hotly debated subjects of the moment; there was widespread feeling that it was a field whose ‘time had come’, that intelligent machines lay ‘just around the corner’. Moreover, with the onset of the revolution in information technology and the proclamation from all corners that we were moving into an ‘information society’, developments in AI and advanced computing were seen in many countries as having both str...