Computational Creativity, Intelligence and Autonomy

The interplay between AI, creativity and autonomy remains an exciting area of research in artificial intelligence and cognitive science. This is evidenced, for example, by the many stimulating papers submitted to and subsequently presented at the recent AISB Computing and Philosophy workshop held at York University in 2011. This Special Issue includes a number of those papers, along with others submitted after the event, all of which investigate one or more of these key concepts within AI. Our contributors come from a wide range of disciplines, and this adds to the rich fecund of material that the issue contains.

We selected these concepts in particular because it is our belief that these three strands are fundamental to the notion of what it is to be human. Alongside ideas about intelligence and autonomy, are also questions about what it is to be creative. For these reasons, issues of “computational creativity” lie at the heart of the intersection of AI, cognitive science, philosophy, and the arts. An autonomous system is typically considered to be a self-determining system, as distinguished from a system whose behaviour is explicitly externally engineered. The concept of autonomy (and autonomous systems) is, therefore, crucial to understanding both intelligent and cognitive systems. In the area of robotics, for instance, issues of embodiment and autonomy are core to the practise of AI and, in the development of enactivism and emergence, conceptually central to a modern understanding of cognition (an area recently explored by Evan Thompson is his 2007 monograph, ‘Mind in Life’ [1]). Indeed, some commentators such as Maturana and Varela [2]—in their seminal work on autopoiesis and cognition—go so far as to suggest autonomy a necessary hurdle over which any ‘living machine’ with a claim to genuine teleology must leap.