Thoughts and Notes on Cognition - Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition - page 171

FIGURE 2. “City of Drawers” by Salvador Dali.
anyone using this style of language. Instead, we romanticize what appears
to be the intellectual functions of the machines. We talk about their “mem-
ories,” we say that these machines store and retrieve “information,” they
“solve problems,” “prove theorems,” etc. Apparently, one is dealing here
with quite intelligent chaps, and there are even some attempts made to
design an A. I. Q., “an artificial intelligence quotient” to carry over into
this new field of “artificial intelligence” with efficacy and authority the mis-
conceptions that are still today quite popular among some prominent
behaviorists.
While our intellectual relationship with these machines awaits clarifica-
tion, in the emotional sphere we seem to do all right. I wish to make this
comment as a footnote to Madeleine Mathiot's delightful observations in
this volume* about various degrees of “awesomeness” associated with the
referential genders “it,” “he,” and “she.” She develops a three-valued logical
place-value system in which the nonhuman “it” carries no reference to
awesomeness either in the negative (absence) or else in the affirmative
(presence), while the human “he” and “she” indeed carry reference to awe-
someness, the masculine “he” referring to its absence, the feminine “she,”
of course, to its presence.
When in the early fifties at the University of Illinois ILLIAC II was built,
“it” was the referential gender used by all of us. The computer group that
* See Chapter 11.