THE MYTH OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
My book, The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can’t Think the Way We Do was published by Harvard University Press in 2021. The paperback edition came out in October 2022. To date, it has been translated into nine languages, and I’m delighted to see how it continues to influence discussions about AI and its limits.
In Part One of the book, The Simplified World, I explain how our AI culture has simplified ideas about people, while expandings ideas about technology. I point out unfortunate simplifications of intelligence I call “intelligence errors.” In Part Two, The Problem of Inference, I argue that the only type of inference—thinking, in other words—that will work for human-level AI (or anything even close to it) is the one we don’t have a clue how to program or engineer. In Part Three, The Future of the Myth, I argue that the myth has very bad consequences if taken seriously, because it subverts science.
Here’s a small sampling of what people have said about it:
If you want to know about AI, read this book…It shows how a supposedly futuristic reverence for Artificial Intelligence retards progress when it denigrates our most irreplaceable resource for any future progress: our own human intelligence. - Peter Thiel
Larson worries that we’re making two mistakes at once, defining human intelligence down while overestimating what AI is likely to achieve…Another concern is learned passivity: our tendency to assume that AI will solve problems and our failure, as a result, to cultivate human ingenuity. —David A. Shaywitz, the Wall Street Journal
A convincing case that artificial general intelligence―machine-based intelligence that matches our own―is beyond the capacity of algorithmic machine learning because there is a mismatch between how humans and machines know what they know. —Sue Halpern, The New York Review of Books
Exposes the vast gap between the actual science underlying AI and the dramatic claims being made for it. —John Horgan