The Soviet scientific programme on AI: if a machine cannot ‘think’, can it ‘control’?

Abstract

AbstractThis article analyses the intellectual and institutional development of the artificial-intelligence (AI) research programme within the Soviet Academy of Sciences from the 1970s to the 1980s. Considering the places and ideas from which it borrowed, I contextualize its goals and projects as part of a larger technoscientific movement aimed at rationalizing Soviet governance, and unpack shared epistemological and cultural assumptions. By tracing their origins to debates accompanying the introduction of cybernetics into Soviet intellectual and political life in the 1950s and early 1960s, I show how Soviet conceptions of ‘thinking machines’ interacted with dialectical materialism and communist socio-technical imaginaries of governance and control. The programme of ‘situational management’ developed by Dmitry Pospelov helps explain the resulting conception of AI as control systems aimed at solving complex tasks that cannot be fully formalized and therefore require new modelling methods to represent real-world situations. This specific orientation can be understood, on the one hand, as a research programme competing with systems analysis and economic cybernetics to rationalize Soviet management, and, on the other hand, as a field trying to demarcate itself from a purely statistical or mathematical approach to modelling cognitive processes.