Pierre de Latil Publishes Thinking by Machine

It's almost comforting that over seventy years ago, we were similarly tantalized by the seductive power of machinic intelligence. As soon as it became clear that machines were excellent at following instructions, we seemed to expect them to also be able to think, on their own. We can see this impulse from a book in France that helped bring the ideas of cybernetics to the continent and, globally, popularize the idea that machines were somehow capable of thinking.

The French science journalist Pierre de Latil published La Pensée artificielle with Gallimard in 1953; it appeared in English in 1956 as Thinking by Machine: A Study of Cybernetics. Writing for general readers, de Latil explained the new science of feedback and control through the machines of its founders, among them W. Ross Ashby's homeostat and W. Grey Walter's electronic tortoises, and asked whether such devices could be said to think. The American edition even carried a foreword by Isaac Asimov.

Are machines really intelligent, really thinking or just fooling us into believing they are? These are persistent questions stretching back decades. Are we closer to an answer today?