
The Myth of Artificial Intelligence
Why Computers Can’t Think the Way We Do
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Narrated by:
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Perry Daniels
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By:
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Erik J. Larson
Futurists insist that AI will soon eclipse the capacities of the most gifted human mind. What hope do we have against superintelligent machines? But we aren't really on the path to developing intelligent machines. In fact, we don't even know where that path might be.
Erik Larson takes us on a tour of the landscape of AI to show how far we are from superintelligence and what it would take to get there. Ever since Alan Turing, AI enthusiasts have equated artificial intelligence with human intelligence. This is a profound mistake. AI works on inductive reasoning, crunching data sets to predict outcomes. But humans don't correlate data sets: We make conjectures informed by context and experience. Human intelligence is a web of best guesses, given what we know about the world. We haven't a clue how to program this kind of intuitive reasoning, known as abduction. Yet it is the heart of common sense. That's why Alexa can't understand what you are asking and why AI can only take us so far.
Larson argues that AI hype is both bad science and bad for science. A culture of invention thrives on exploring unknowns, not overselling existing methods. Inductive AI will continue to improve at narrow tasks, but if we want to make real progress, we will need to start by more fully appreciating the only true intelligence we know - our own.
©2021 Erik J. Larson (P)2021 TantorListeners also enjoyed...




















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Must read on AI
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I thoroughly enjoyed this book and strongly recommend it to all and especially Kurzweill, Musk and Bostrum.
Intelligent and Convincing
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Outstanding Counterpoint to the AI craze
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Great information and explanation
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Informative, Thought-provoking
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A path forward?
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Very Good
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->(1) Ray Kurzweil, Nick Bostrom, Max Tegmark, etc., all erroneously believe that humanity is on track to develop human level, or above, AI.
->(2) We do not know how to automate novel inference, called 'abduction'. Although existing AI can solve various problems using deductive and inductive logic, it is really bad at inventing things out of the blue.
->(3) Charles Sanders Peirce coined the term abduction to mean the "logic" of coming up with novel hypotheses.
->(4) We don't know how to automate abduction, much less formally define it.
->(5) We can't go from mere deduction and induction, to abduction.
->(6) We are NOT on track to AGI. We are still at the whiteboard, guessing. We have no roadmap.
->(7) There is a mythology surrounding AI in the human social order. It is symbolic. Symbols also shape the direction society goes.
No one else has written a popular book that philosophically critiques contemporary AI as successfully as this one. Moreover, I agree with the approach taken in the book.
There were some aspects of the book that were slightly disappointing:
->(disappointment 1) I would like a deeper dive into the philosophical aspects... which is a tall order, especially in human language.
->(disappointment 2) I suspect that Larson could have better steel-manned some of the ideas he criticized. I do not appreciate appeals to common sense, as that seems like handwaving. Maybe I missed something, but I think his argument could have been further developed.
I guess I'll be reading Peirce, and reviewing automata theory and AIXI. But I am grateful for this book, and I think it deserves 5 out of 5. Or at least closer to a 5 than a 4. Because what counts here is the overall gist of the argument, which in this case is extremely on point, and does not conform to the contemporary narrative.
A critique of contemporary AI
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abduction is the real intelligence
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spoiler alert: no one has a clear, programmable version of Intelligence to create.
However, several of his examples that "can't be done by current AI" are easily handled by ChatGPT 4.
great overall but not up to date
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