PERSON
David Hilbert
The mathematician who tried to drain reasoning of everything but its form and, in failing magnificently, gave us both the computer and the proof that intelligence—biological or artificial—can never be complete, consistent, and self-certifying all at once.
David Hilbert is the founding ancestor of artificial intelligence who never saw a computer and would not have called himself its prophet. He was a formalist: he believed that mathematics is not fundamentally about numbers or shapes or any objects at all, but about the rule-governed manipulation of symbols. A proof, on this account, is a finite sequence of marks, each obtained from earlier marks by mechanical rules, and whether something is a proof can be checked without understanding what any of it means. This is the essential move, and it is recognizably the founding intuition of every AI system that has followed: that thought is the manipulation of tokens by formal rules, and that meaning is something added afterward. From this he built his program—the demand that all of mathematics be proven complete, consistent, and decidable, that every true statement be provable, no contradiction derivable, and a definite mechanical procedure exist to settle any question. In 1928 he
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