A Starter Reading List in the Philosophy of AI

A short, opinionated list of works that frame most of what I write about here. Each deserves a post of its own; for now, one line each.

Year	Work	Why it matters
1950	Alan Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”	Replaces “Can machines think?” with a test — and anticipates most objections.
1972	Hubert Dreyfus, What Computers Can’t Do	The phenomenological case against symbolic AI.
1980	John Searle, “Minds, Brains, and Programs”	The Chinese Room: syntax is not sufficient for semantics.
1985	John Haugeland, Artificial Intelligence: The Very Idea	The clearest account of what “GOFAI” was committed to.
1998	Andy Clark & David Chalmers, “The Extended Mind”	Where does a mind end, and could a tool be part of one?
2020	Emily Bender & Alexander Koller, “Climbing towards NLU”	Form versus meaning, argued for the age of language models.

How to read them

Start with Turing and Searle together; they are still arguing with each other. Read Dreyfus and Haugeland as a pair on the old AI, then ask which of their claims survive the move to learned systems.