"Exposes the vast gap between the actual science underlying AI and the
dramatic claims being made for it."
--John Horgan
"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
Ever since Alan Turing, AI enthusiasts have equated artificial
intelligence with human intelligence. A computer scientist working at
the forefront of natural language processing, Erik Larson takes us on a
tour of the landscape of AI to reveal why 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. And we haven't a clue how to program
that kind of intuitive reasoning, which lies at the heart of common
sense. Futurists insist AI will soon eclipse the capacities of the most
gifted mind, but Larson shows how far we are from superintelligence--and
what it would take to get there.
"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, 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, New York Review of Books
