Jacques Bolo

This essay replies to some representative authors, canonic indeed, of the opposition to artificial intelligence : Hubert L. DREYFUS, with his study, systematic enough in its time, What Computers can't do. His phenomenological critic meets a numerous audience, even among computer scientists. Joseph WEIZENBAUM, research worker in artificial intelligence himself, gone over to the opposition with his book Computer Power and Human Reason. His objections are classically moral and anti-techno-scientific. The philosopher John R. SEARLE, whose book Mind, Brain and Science reminds us most of the resistances of linguistic scientists against artificial intelligence, turning the real difficulties of formalization of language in ontological impossibilities. Terry WINOGRAD, another research worker of the early times of AI, and Fernando FLORES, former economy minister of Chile in 1973, both rebels against the computerization of the human's world - thanks to the phenomenological post-hedeggerian way of think -, in their common work, Understanding Computers and Cognition. Phenomenological philosophy has found the perfect target with AI, which embodies the image of science for the post-romantic thinking. This image can be perfectly symbolized by the frescos, choosen for the cover of this very book, situated on the walls of the Sorbonne University Library stairs! Againts the arguments of this running down romantical thinking, this book make the effort to answer on every point. But this work invites us to give up the intellectual illusions too, against which the method of cognitive sciences and information processing can be used as riddle. Incidentally, the approach of this critical method itself can be considered too as an automatic knowledge management try.