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

Review

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

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. Wiebe E. Bijker is Professor at Maastricht University and the author of Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs: Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change (MIT Press) and other books. Trevor Pinch is Goldwin Smith Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University and coeditor of The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology (anniversary edition, MIT Press).

Edition details

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