PERSON
Jerome Bruner
The cognitive psychologist who helped start the revolution that made artificial intelligence thinkable—and then spent his final decades issuing the sharpest available warning against the thing that revolution became: a science that confused information processing with meaning-making.
Jerome Bruner is the double witness of the cognitive age: the man who helped establish that the mind processes information, and who then spent thirty years insisting that processing information is not what the mind is
for. In 1960 he and George Miller opened the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies, which did as much as any institution to make cognition a respectable scientific subject—and in doing so helped create the intellectual foundation on which artificial intelligence was built. By 1990, in
Acts of Meaning, he had turned against the revolution he helped lead, arguing that the cognitive sciences had made a fateful substitution: replacing the construction of meaning, which was the original goal, with the processing of information, which was tractable. The two are not the same. “Information,” he wrote, “is indifferent with respect to meaning”—a bit moves through a channel blind to what it is about, and a science built on that foundation inherits its blindness.