Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
Telematic technologies, so-called, will impinge increasingly on personal and professional lives in the decades to come. Digitized data are already transforming international communication and the way we live our everyday lives. Sharper conceptual instruments are needed to help us analyse how to deal with these changes, as technological evolution outpaces the cultural, and the nature of the questions to be resolved is semantic rather than technical. The Turing and the Chinese room tests are invoked to help examine how man and computer can work together. But however well provided we are with syntactic and semantic knowledge, it is the absence of a developed pragmatics that stands in the way of truly intelligent computers and search engines that can do more than match symbols - i.e. identify matching content via genuinely pluridisciplinary linkages.