The Foundations of Computing
Brian Cantwell Smith · The MIT Press eBooks · 2002
Will computers ever be conscious? Is it appropriate—correct, illuminating, ethical—to understand people in computational terms? Will quantum, dna, or nanocomputers radically alter our conception of computation? How will computing affect science, the arts, intellectual history? I have never known how to answer these questions, because I have never been sure what computation is. More than twenty-five years ago, this uncertainty led me to undertake a long-term investigation of the foundations of computer science and artificial intelligence. That study is now largely complete. My aim in this paper is to summarise some of the results.1