Affect and Artificial Intelligence by Elizabeth A. Wilson

Author:Elizabeth A. Wilson
Format: epub
Published: 2015-06-13T16:00:00+00:00

4 / WAlTer PITTS And The InhIBITIon of AffeCT

Pitts was married to abstract thought. . . . We never knew anything about his family or his feelings about us. He died mysterious, sad and remote, and not once did I find out, or even want to find out more about how he felt or what he hoped. To be interested in him as a person was to lose him as a friend. One was to be interested only in what he knew.

—Jerome Lettvin

n june 1954, the month that alan turIng dIed (at age forty-

one), Fortune magazine published an article about the twenty most talented scientists in the United States under the age of forty. The article investigated the characteristics that mark distinguished scientific careers: “What kind of man becomes an outstanding scientist? Is there a widening gulf between him and the rest of society?” (Bello 1954, 142). The article contains a portfolio of ten young men working in universities and ten working in industry.1 They are mathematicians, physicists, biologists, chemists, astronomers; there is also one psychologist, Leon Festinger. There is a photo of each—standing in front of a blackboard, a computer panel, a bookshelf, at his desk, or in his laboratory. Most wear a suit jacket and tie.

Alongside James Watson (age twenty-six) from Caltech and Claude Shannon (age thirty-eight) from Bell Labs is Walter Pitts from MIT. Unlike the others, he has no suit jacket; his shirt sleeves are rolled up and he looks impassively to one side of the camera. The caption with his photo reads: “Walter Pitts, thirty-one, mathematician, hopes to arrive at mathematical theories of brain function, is considered erudite in many fields. He was born

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