"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
A cutting-edge AI researcher and tech entrepreneur debunks the fantasy
that superintelligence is just a few clicks away--and argues that this
myth is not just wrong, it's actively blocking innovation and distorting
our ability to make the crucial next leap.
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.
A tech entrepreneur and pioneering research scientist working at the
forefront of natural language processing, 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.
