Reviews for What Computers Still Can't Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason

The average rating for What Computers Still Can't Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-01-06 00:00:00 Jason Carsten Using philosophical arguments from Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, Dreyfus convincingly demonstrates that there are things people can do, sometimes even without great effort, but which computers are simply incapable of ever being able to achieve. He ends with a list of 20 such items. Thirty-odd years after initial publication, computers still can't do 18 of them - it turns out that Dreyfus wasn't quite right about Grandmaster-level chess and large-vocabulary continuous speech recognition. Maybe there was a bug in Merleau-Ponty's conceptual analysis. Oh well... if one out of two ain't bad, surely eighteen out of twenty is pretty darn good?

Review # 2 was written on 2020-11-25 00:00:00 Michael Feher "Being is essentially different from a being, from beings" - stated Heidegger. In other words, what gives beings their being is not itself a being. Translated into AI language, this means that what makes some things programmable is not itself programmable and moreover it cannot be specified, described, or even named. When the digital computer was invented, an entire generation of programmers from MIT and other leading institutions optimistically postulated that General AI was within reach and rushed to accomplish it. Unfortunately, they naively followed the standard metaphysics and its excessively rational definitions of what human and intelligence mean - metaphysics developed and perpetuated by most of the philosophers over the last two thousands of years. This first AI attempt failed; however some byproducts were created. The second AI wave also failed; while we are now in the middle of the third wave. Dreyfus's philosophical "critique of artificial reason" was perfectly on the mark, devastating, and fulfilled almost completely in several years. According to Dreyfus, none of the four assumptions employed by the AI workers (biological, psychological, epistemological, and ontological) were justified and compared the AI workers with the old alchemists. Instead of paying any attention to him, the AI workers - most of them his peers at MIT - insulted and completely avoided him on the campus. According to Dreyfus, the digital computer logic and its working requires these particular four assumptions - since others cannot be implemented on it. Consequently, the AI workers adopted the four assumptions as self-evident and built their careers and dreams on them. It seemed obvious to them that a philosopher cannot understand their work and cannot criticize them; consequently, they refused to listen to him and optimistically persevered in their work despite increasing difficulties and failures. Dreyfus was exactly in the right place to point out their basic metaphysical assumptions; that is, he was a continental philosophy professor at MIT and he was just invited into the most advanced AI program at that time - RAND. Pointing out metaphysical assumptions - deeply rooted into our cultural, scientific, and technological worldviews for hundreds of years - to programmers is inevitably going to lead to huge and insanely funny miss-communications as presented in this book and in its reception by the AI community. I never laugh so much while reading a book as technical and philosophical as this one. But here is a sober reflection from this book: while it is not possible to create a digital program or machine to match humans, this constant and ubiquitous programming and digital worldview may reduce humans to match the existing digital programs and machines. In Heidegger's terms, this is called "enframing": as everything else that is, man will be eventually turned into a resource by technology and for the further use of technology. It seems to me that most of the present AI work dropped the original strong pretense to build a General AI and they are instead focusing on limited, but highly practical and successful use of neural networks trained on big data. However, there are some old-fashioned AI workers out there that still predict that "the singularity is near"; that is in a never-changing 20 years horizon (i.e. not short enough to compromise themselves with a failed prediction, but long enough to sustain enthusiasm and to build a career for themselves). The AI field changed a lot since the first wave - called "good old-fashioned AI" - that Dreyfus criticized in this book. Since some assumptions and approaches were dropped in the AI field for good, the corresponding critiques in this book no longer apply. However, I believe that the main arguments presented in this book still stand against General AI understood as a "rational conscience"/"singularity" and prove its impossibility. Interestingly enough, Nature published an article against General AI a few months ago; the author used some of Dreyfus's old arguments to prove its impossibility (). This is just the old 1972 book with a "new"/1979 introduction.