2025
Margaret Boden, Philosopher of Artificial Intelligence, Dies at 88
A cognitive scientist, she used the language of computers to explore the nature of human thought and creativity, offering prescient insights about A.I.
Margaret Boden in 1994. “What’s unique about Maggie is that she’s a philosopher who has informed, inspired and shaped science,” Blay Whitby, a fellow philosopher, said.Credit...Antonin Cermak/Fairfax Media, via Getty Images
By Michael S. Rosenwald
Aug. 14, 2025, 4:36 p.m. ET
Margaret Boden, a British philosopher and cognitive scientist who used the language of computers to explore the nature of thought and creativity, leading her to prescient insights about the possibilities and limitations of artificial intelligence, died on July 18 in Brighton, England. She was 88.
Her death, in a care home, was announced by the University of Sussex, where in the early 1970s she helped establish what is now known as the Center for Cognitive Science, bringing together psychologists, linguists, neuroscientists and philosophers to collaborate on studying the mind.
Polymathic, erudite and a trailblazer in a field dominated by men, Professor Boden produced a number of books — most notably “The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms” (1990) and “Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science” (2006) — that helped shape the philosophical conversation about human and artificial intelligence for decades.
瑪格麗特·博登凝視遠方的黑白照片。
瑪格麗特·博登，攝於1994年。 「瑪格麗特的獨特之處在於，她是一位哲學家，她啟蒙並塑造了科學，」她的哲學家布萊·惠特比說。圖片來源：Antonin Cermak/Fairfax Media，來自蓋蒂圖片社
邁克爾·S·羅森瓦爾德
*
2025年8月14日，美國東部時間下午4:36
瑪格麗特·博登是一位英國哲學家和認知科學家，她運用電腦語言探索思維和創造力的本質，並對人工智慧的可能性和限制有著先見之明。她於7月18日在英國布萊頓逝世。享年88歲。
她在一家養老院去世，這一消息由薩塞克斯大學宣布。 1970年代初，她在該大學協助建立瞭如今的認知科學中心，匯集心理學家、語言學家、神經科學家和哲學家，共同研究心智。
博登教授博學多識，學識淵博，是男性主導領域的先驅。她出版了多部著作，其中最著名的是《創造性思維：神話與機制》（1990年）和《心智作為機器：認知科學史》（2006年），這些著作塑造了數十年來關於人類和人工智慧的哲學討論。
「瑪姬的獨特之處在於，她是一位啟蒙、塑造和影響科學的哲學家，」哲學家兼倫理學家布萊惠特比 (Blay Whitby) 在 2014 年的 BBC 廣播節目《科學人生》中說道。 “我強調這一點很重要，因為許多現代科學家認為哲學家沒什麼可說的，建議他們看看瑪吉·博登的作品和生活。”
她將計算視為一種解釋人類思維機制的方式。對她而言，創造力並非神來之筆，亦非頓悟式魔法的產物，而是一個可以用電腦建模甚至模擬的過程。
「正是計算概念幫助我們理解一個人如何能夠提出一個新想法，」博登教授在《生命科學》節目中說道。 “因為乍一看，這似乎完全不可能。一定是上帝創造了它。”
她繼續說道，計算機科學幫助我們“理解生成系統是什麼，理解如何可能存在一套規則——這套規則可能非常非常短，易於簡要表述——但它有可能生成無限多種不同的結構。”
She identified three types of creativity — combinational, exploratory and transformational — by analyzing human and artificial intelligence.
In combinational creativity, familiar ideas are combined in unfamiliar ways — in lines of poetry, for example, or satirical cartoons in The New Yorker or the work of artists who blend cubism with surrealism.
“In one sense, this is easy to model on a computer,” Professor Boden wrote in “The Creative Mind.” “For nothing is simpler than picking out two ideas (two data structures) and putting them alongside each other. In short: a computer could merrily produce novel combinations till kingdom come.”
Computers seem perfectly capable of such thinking, she pointed out, citing as an example Impro-Visor, a computer program that plays jazz.
Impro-Visor “relies on a database that can be closely modeled on a particular musician’s style (Parker, Armstrong, and so on), and which can be adapted to non-jazz styles as well,” she wrote in “The Creative Mind.” “The explorations are subtle, extended and (expressiveness apart) uncannily convincing. There’s some twisting and tweaking, as the dimensions being explored are pushed.”
But it crucially lacks what is inherently human: the ability to evaluate whether the output is any good.
Then there’s transformational creativity, “the ‘sexiest’ of the three types,” Professor Boden wrote in AI Magazine, “because it can give rise to ideas that are not only new but fundamentally different from any that went before.”
她指出，電腦似乎完全具備這種思考能力，並以演奏爵士樂的電腦程式 Impro-Visor 為例。
她在《創造性思維》中寫道，Impro-Visor「依賴一個資料庫，該資料庫可以緊密模仿特定音樂家的風格（例如帕克、阿姆斯壯等等），也可以適應非爵士樂風格」。 「它的探索微妙、深入，而且（除了表現力之外）令人難以置信地信服。隨著探索維度的拓展，其中不乏一些扭曲和調整。”
但它至關重要地缺乏人類固有的特質：評估輸出是否優秀的能力。
此外，還有變革性創造力，“三種類型中最‘性感’的，”博登教授在《人工智能雜誌》上寫道，“因為它能夠催生出不僅新穎，而且與以往任何想法都截然不同的想法。”
一家二手書店：心理學家喬治·A·米勒、尤金·加蘭特和卡爾·H·普里布拉姆合著的《計劃與行為結構》（1960年）。
「這是第一本將電腦程式的概念應用於整個心理學領域的書，」她說。 “它真的在五分鐘內改變了我的生活。”
身為人工智慧哲學家，博登教授經常被問到她是否認為機器人會或能夠接管社會。
「事實是，它們肯定不想這麼做，」她在2018年《永旺》雜誌上寫道。
為什麼？因為機器人不像人類，它們不在乎。
“計算機的‘目標’，”她寫道，“沒有任何感覺。”
a used bookstore: “Plans and the Structure of Behavior” (1960), by the psychologists George A. Miller, Eugene Galanter and Karl H. Pribram.
“It was the first book which took the idea of computer programs and applied that idea to the whole of psychology,” she said. “It literally changed my life in five minutes.”
As a philosopher of AI, Professor Boden was often asked if she thought that robots would, or could, take over society.
“The truth is that they certainly won’t want to,” she wrote in Aeon magazine in 2018.
Why? Because robots, unlike humans, don’t care.
“A computer’s ‘goals,’” she wrote, “are empty of feeling.”
2014
Margaret Boden 的著作，十幾年前我買過數本，今天似乎初次看到照片。
BBC Radio 4
Professor Maggie Boden is a world authority in the field of artificial intelligence. On The Life Scientific she reveals why she believes that questions about the human mind can't be answered within a single academic subject.
http://bbc.in/1wnFCHA
Margaret Boden, The Life Scientific - BBC Radio 4
Jim Al-Khalili talks to Maggie Boden, a world authority in the field of AI.
BBC.IN
沒有留言:
張貼留言