Descartes’ Order of Discovery and AI

The Cartesian order of discovery, as a rubric for a system of human understanding, was an early realization of Enlightenment principles in epistemology. It remains influential to this day and can be recognized in the development of AI technologies, most visibly in machine learning and the model of the knowledge-based agent. Descartes’ calcul géométrique, a forerunner to analytic geometry, is foundational to the machine learning algorithms that power autonomous learning agents. And, in a manner after the Cartesian deduction, the knowledge-based agent constructs its worldview from the axioms of its knowledge base via logical and discursive operations. Beyond methodology, the logic of Cartesian order obtains a distinctive ontology, as in the belief in artificial general intelligence. This rationale for AGI veers toward the kind of ontological argument that would be familiar to Descartes, with the human subject replaced by the computer and the supremely perfect being personified in AGI.