PERSON

René Descartes

The seventeenth-century philosopher who drew, with terrifying precision, the line between a thing that behaves as if it thinks and a thing that thinks — and whose instruments remain the clearest tools for understanding why that line is so difficult to locate in the machines we have built.

René Descartes (1596–1650) is the patient zero of the problem of machine intelligence. He did not predict artificial intelligence; he did something rarer. In the Discourse on the Method (1637) and the Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), he drew with terrifying precision the line that the AI moment now forces us to walk: the line between a thing that behaves as if it thinks and a thing that thinks. He proposed that animals and the human body were machines, that a machine could in principle imitate almost any human act — and then he named the two things he believed no machine could ever do. The first was to use language responsively, arranging words to answer the open meaning of whatever was said in its presence. We have built that machine. The second was to act as a universal instrument, meeting the unforeseen with reason rather than breaking

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