Smart Paul
Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, Highfield, Southampton SO17 1BJ UK.
Minds Mach (Dordr). 2017;27(2):357-380. doi: 10.1007/s11023-016-9416-z. Epub 2017 Jan 3.
The Internet is an important focus of attention for the philosophy of mind and cognitive science communities. This is partly because the Internet serves as an important part of the material environment in which a broad array of human cognitive and epistemic activities are situated. The Internet can thus be seen as an important part of the 'cognitive ecology' that helps to shape, support and (on occasion) realize aspects of human cognizing. Much of the previous philosophical work in this area has sought to analyze the cognitive significance of the Internet from the perspective of human cognition. There has, as such, been little effort to assess the cognitive significance of the Internet from the perspective of 'machine cognition'. This is unfortunate, because the Internet is likely to exert a significant influence on the shape of machine intelligence. The present paper attempts to evaluate the extent to which the Internet serves as a form of cognitive ecology for synthetic (machine-based) forms of intelligence. In particular, the phenomenon of Internet-situated machine intelligence is analyzed from the perspective of a number of approaches that are typically subsumed under the heading of situated cognition. These include extended, embedded, scaffolded and embodied approaches to cognition. For each of these approaches, the Internet is shown to be of potential relevance to the development and operation of machine-based cognitive capabilities. Such insights help us to appreciate the role of the Internet in advancing the current state-of-the-art in machine intelligence.
互联网是心灵哲学和认知科学领域关注的一个重要焦点。部分原因在于，互联网是物质环境的重要组成部分，众多人类认知和认识活动都发生在这一环境中。因此，互联网可被视为“认知生态”的重要组成部分，有助于塑造、支持并（有时）实现人类认知的各个方面。此前该领域的许多哲学研究都试图从人类认知的角度分析互联网的认知意义。然而，从“机器认知”的角度评估互联网的认知意义的努力却很少。这很遗憾，因为互联网可能会对机器智能的形态产生重大影响。本文试图评估互联网作为合成（基于机器）智能的一种认知生态形式的程度。具体而言，从通常归入情境认知范畴的多种方法的角度，分析了基于互联网的机器智能现象。这些方法包括认知的延展、嵌入、支架和具身方法。对于这些方法中的每一种，都表明互联网与基于机器的认知能力的发展和运行可能相关。这些见解有助于我们理解互联网在推动当前机器智能发展水平方面的作用。
