Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
other party does not in any sense 'understand' what is going on does not seem to inval-
idate the perspective taken since the interaction occurs despite this. The effect is the
same as if the transaction had involved two people, a meaningful conversation had taken
place, and a mutually satisfactory outcome achieved.
The issue of meaning needs to be explicitly addressed, if only because it is difficult to
see who or what within the organisation 'knows' what has happened once the transaction
has been completed. To argue that the organisation itself is what 'understands' in effect
simply shifts the problem up a level. Yet the conclusion that the actions taken have been
socially meaningful seems inescapable; value has been exchanged in consequence of
entering into the transaction, and the outcomes are fully binding on both parties. Clearly
the original system designers would once have understood the process, and it is certain
that company accountants and others will understand the nature of the relevant trans-
actions in general terms, but this is not the same as having direct knowledge or an un-
mediated understanding of actual events. In a contemporary organisation it is in any
case quite possible that the original programmers will have left or forgotten the details
of the system. In a downsizing world there is no guarantee that anybody still working
in the company will know any more about an autonomous system's activities than they
would about those of any other colleague carrying out responsible work. The possibility
that an autonomous system will carry on doing business on behalf of an organisation
long after the last person to leave has turned off the lights is a real one.
It is notable that it is precisely the issue of understanding, or rather what or who under-
stands, that has been at the heart of many an esoteric, acerbic debate in the cognitive
science and artificial intelligence (AI) arenas (Rey, 1997). In his now famous 'Chinese
Room' thought experiment, the philosopher John Searle postulates a system comprising
various entities including people (who cannot speak Chinese) that is able to reliably and
instantaneously translate English into Chinese by applying a set of categorical rules;
Searle asks who or what it is that understands Chinese (Searle 1980, p. 422). No definitive
answer (i.e. satisfactory to both proponents and critics of AI) has been forthcoming (Rey,
1997, p. 271). Alan Turing fell back on a purely behaviourist perspective when proposing
the 'Turing test' (Turing, 1950), taking the view that if a system is able to fool its inter-
locutors about whether or not it is a person, then it should be taken as being able to
think, but that was an approach that has caused more debates than it has resolved (Rey,
1997, p. 153).
Autonomous IS are small fry in comparison with the kind of complex and often threat-
ening entity that is usually postulated when AI is discussed (Crevier, 1993). Yet the issue
seems to be the same in principle, a view that is strengthened by the clear possibility
that the interactional capacities of autonomous systems will continue to increase. With
this in mind, the theoretical approach followed here is to adhere to a precedent from
cognitive science, and for analytical purposes to ascribe the capacity to understand to
the system - '[this] does not say that intentional systems
really
have beliefs and desires,
but that one can explain and predict their behaviour by
ascribing
beliefs and desires to
them … the decision to adopt [this] strategy is pragmatic and not intrinsically right or
wrong' (Dennett, 1978, p. 7 - emphases in original). The surrounding context makes it
quite clear that ATMs were not the type of entity that Dennett had in mind when making
his argument, but the logic seems equally applicable.
The information systems business language (ISBL)
It is now generally accepted that a language embeds a world view, or theory of the world
(Gadamer, 1989; Pinker 1994), in that the concepts available within it limit what can
Search WWH ::
Custom Search