Margaret Boden, Philosopher of Artificial Intelligence, Dies at 88

Science|Margaret Boden, Philosopher of Artificial Intelligence, Dies at 88

Margaret Boden, a British philosopher and cognitive scientist who used the language of computers to explore the nature of thought and creativity, leading her to prescient insights about the possibilities and limitations of artificial intelligence, died on July 18 in Brighton, England. She was 88.

Her death, in a care home, was announced by the University of Sussex, where in the early 1970s she helped establish what is now known as the Center for Cognitive Science, bringing together psychologists, linguists, neuroscientists and philosophers to collaborate on studying the mind.

Polymathic, erudite and a trailblazer in a field dominated by men, Professor Boden produced a number of books — most notably “The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms” (1990) and “Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science” (2006) — that helped shape the philosophical conversation about human and artificial intelligence for decades.

“What’s unique about Maggie is that she’s a philosopher who has informed, inspired and shaped science,” Blay Whitby, a philosopher and ethicist, said on the BBC radio show “The Life Scientific” in 2014. “It’s important I emphasize that, because many modern scientists say that philosophers have got nothing to tell them, and they’d be advised to look at the work and life of Maggie Boden.”

Professor Boden was not adept at using computers.

“I can’t cope with the damn things,” she once said. “I have a Mac on my desk, and if anything goes wrong, it’s an absolute nightmare.”

Nevertheless, she viewed computing as a way to help explain the mechanisms of human thought. To her, creativity wasn’t divine or a result of eureka-like magic, but rather a process that could be modeled and even simulated by computers.