What Computers Can't Do - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Hubert Lederer Dreyfus is an American philosopher. He is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley....

has been a critic of artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...

research since the 1960s. In a series of papers and books, including Alchemy and AI Dreyfus, What Computers Can't Do Dreyfus and Mind over Machine Dreyfus, he presented an assessment of AI's progress and a critique of the philosophical foundations of the field. Dreyfus' objections are discussed in most introductions to the philosophy of artificial intelligence

Philosophy of artificial intelligence

The philosophy of artificial intelligence attempts to answer such questions as:* Can a machine act intelligently? Can it solve any problem that a person would solve by thinking?...

, including , the standard AI textbook, and in , a survey of contemporary philosophy.

Dreyfus argued that human intelligence and expertise depend primarily on unconscious instincts rather than conscious symbolic

Physical symbol system

A physical symbol system takes physical patterns , combining them into structures and manipulating them to produce new expressions....

manipulation, and that these unconscious skills could never be captured in formal rules. His critique was based on the insights of modern continental philosopher

Continental philosophy

Continental philosophy, in contemporary usage, refers to a set of traditions of 19th and 20th century philosophy from mainland Europe. This sense of the term originated among English-speaking philosophers in the second half of the 20th century, who used it to refer to a range of thinkers and...

s such as Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, and was directed at the first wave of AI research which used high level formal symbols

Physical symbol system

A physical symbol system takes physical patterns , combining them into structures and manipulating them to produce new expressions....

to represent reality and tried to reduce intelligence to symbol manipulation.

When Dreyfus' ideas were first introduced in the mid-1960s, they were met with ridicule and outright hostility. But by the 1980s, many of his perspectives were rediscovered by researchers working in robotics

Robotics

Robotics is the branch of technology that deals with the design, construction, operation, structural disposition, manufacture and application of robots...

and the new field of connectionism

Connectionism

Connectionism is a set of approaches in the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience and philosophy of mind, that models mental or behavioral phenomena as the emergent processes of interconnected networks of simple units...

—approaches now called "sub-symbolic" because they eschew early AI research's emphasis on high level symbols. Historian and AI researcher Daniel Crevier

Daniel Crevier

Daniel Crevier is a Canadian entrepreneur and artificial intelligence and image processing researcher. He is also the author of AI: the Tumultuous History of the Search for Artificial Intelligence. In 1974 Crevier received a Ph.D. degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology...

writes: "time has proven the accuracy and perceptiveness of some of Dreyfus's comments." Dreyfus would say in 2007 "I figure I won and it's over—they've given up."

The grandiose promises of artificial intelligence

In Alchemy and AI Dreyfus and What Computers Can't Do Dreyfus, Dreyfus

Hubert Dreyfus

Hubert Lederer Dreyfus is an American philosopher. He is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley....

summarized the history of artificial intelligence

History of artificial intelligence

The history of artificial intelligence began in antiquity, with myths, stories and rumors of artificial beings endowed with intelligence or consciousness by master craftsmen; as Pamela McCorduck writes, AI began with "an ancient wish to forge the gods."...

and ridiculed the unbridled optimism that permeated the field. For example, Herbert Simon

Herbert Simon

Herbert Alexander Simon was an American political scientist, economist, sociologist, and psychologist, and professor—most notably at Carnegie Mellon University—whose research ranged across the fields of cognitive psychology, cognitive science, computer science, public administration, economics,...

, following the success of his program General Problem Solver

General Problem Solver

General Problem Solver was a computer program created in 1959 by Herbert Simon, J.C. Shaw, and Allen Newell intended to work as a universal problem solver machine. Any formalized symbolic problem can be solved, in principle, by GPS. For instance: theorems proof, geometric problems and chess...

Newell, predicted that by 1967:

A computer would be world champion in chess.
A computer would discover and prove an important new mathematical theorem.
Most theories in psychology will take the form of computer programs.

The press reported these predictions in glowing reports of the imminent arrival of machine intelligence.

Dreyfus felt that this optimism was totally unwarranted. He believed that they were based on false assumptions about the nature of human intelligence. Pamela McCorduck explains Dreyfus position:

[A] great misunderstanding accounts for public confusion about thinking machines, a misunderstanding perpetrated by the unrealistic claims researchers in AI have been making, claims that thinking machines are already here, or at any rate, just around the corner.

These predictions were based on the success of an "information processing" model of the mind, articulated by Newell and Simon in their physical symbol systems hypothesis, and later expanded into a philosophical position known as computationalism by philosophers such as Jerry Fodor

Jerry Fodor

Jerry Alan Fodor is an American philosopher and cognitive scientist. He holds the position of State of New Jersey Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University and is the author of many works in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science, in which he has laid the groundwork for the...

and Hillary Putnam. Believing that they had successfully simulated the essential process of human thought with simple programs, it seemed a short step to producing fully intelligent machines. However, Dreyfus argued that philosophy, especially 20th century philosophy, had discovered serious problems with this information processing viewpoint. The mind, according to modern philosophy, is nothing like a computer.

Dreyfus' four assumptions of artificial intelligence research

In Alchemy and AI and What Computers Can't Do, Dreyfus identified four philosophical assumptions that supported the faith of early AI researchers that human intelligence depended on the manipulation of symbols. "In each case," Dreyfus writes, "the assumption is taken by workers in [AI] as an axiom, guaranteeing results, whereas it is, in fact, one hypothesis among others, to be tested by the success of such work."

The biological assumption: The brain processes information in discrete operations by way of some biological equivalent of on/off switches.

In the early days of research into neurology

Neurology

Neurology is a medical specialty dealing with disorders of the nervous system. Specifically, it deals with the diagnosis and treatment of all categories of disease involving the central, peripheral, and autonomic nervous systems, including their coverings, blood vessels, and all effector tissue,...

, scientists realized that neuron

Neuron

A neuron is an electrically excitable cell that processes and transmits information by electrical and chemical signaling. Chemical signaling occurs via synapses, specialized connections with other cells. Neurons connect to each other to form networks. Neurons are the core components of the nervous...

s fire in all-or-nothing pulses. Several researchers, such as Walter Pitts

Walter Pitts

Walter Harry Pitts, Jr. was a logician who worked in the field of cognitive psychology.He proposed landmark theoretical formulations of neural activity and emergent processes that influenced diverse fields such as cognitive sciences and psychology, philosophy, neurosciences, computer science,...

and Warren McCulloch

Warren Sturgis McCulloch

Warren Sturgis McCulloch was an American neurophysiologist and cybernetician, known for his work on the foundation for certain brain theories and his contribution to the cybernetics movement.- Biography :...

, argued that neurons functioned similar to the way Boolean logic

Boolean logic

Boolean algebra is a logical calculus of truth values, developed by George Boole in the 1840s. It resembles the algebra of real numbers, but with the numeric operations of multiplication xy, addition x + y, and negation −x replaced by the respective logical operations of...

gates operate, and so could be imitated by electronic circuitry at the level of the neuron.
When digital computers became widely used in the early 50s, this argument was extended to suggest that the brain was a vast physical symbol system

Physical symbol system

A physical symbol system takes physical patterns , combining them into structures and manipulating them to produce new expressions....

, manipulating the binary symbols of zero and one. Dreyfus was able to refute the biological assumption by citing research in neurology

Neurology

that suggested that the action and timing of neuron firing had analog components. To be fair, however, Daniel Crevier observes that "few still held that belief in the early 1970s, and nobody argued against Dreyfus" about the biological assumption.

The psychological assumption: The mind can be viewed as a device operating on bits of information according to formal rules.

He refuted this assumption by showing that much of what we "know" about the world consists of complex attitudes or tendencies that make us lean towards one interpretation over another. He argued that, even when we use explicit symbols, we are using them against an unconscious background of commonsense knowledge and that without this background our symbols cease to mean anything. This background, in Dreyfus' view, was not implemented in individual brains as explicit individual symbols with explicit individual meanings.

The epistemological assumption: All knowledge can be formalized.

This concerns the philosophical issue of epistemology, or the study of knowledge

Knowledge

Knowledge is a familiarity with someone or something unknown, which can include information, facts, descriptions, or skills acquired through experience or education. It can refer to the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject...

. Even if we agree that the psychological assumption is false, AI researchers could still argue (as AI founder John McCarthy

John McCarthy (computer scientist)

John McCarthy was an American computer scientist and cognitive scientist. He coined the term "artificial intelligence" , invented the Lisp programming language and was highly influential in the early development of AI.McCarthy also influenced other areas of computing such as time sharing systems...

has) that it was possible for a symbol processing machine to represent all knowledge, regardless of whether human beings represented knowledge the same way. Dreyfus argued that there was no justification for this assumption, since so much of human knowledge was not symbolic.

The ontological assumption: The world consists of independent facts that can be represented by independent symbols

Dreyfus

Hubert Dreyfus

Hubert Lederer Dreyfus is an American philosopher. He is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley....

also identified a subtler assumption about the world. AI researchers (and futurists and science fiction writers) often assume that there is no limit to formal, scientific knowledge, because they assume that any phenomenon in the universe can be described by symbols or scientific theories. This assumes that everything that exists can be understood as objects, properties of objects, classes of objects, relations of objects, and so on: precisely those things that can be described by logic, language and mathematics. The question of what exists is called ontology

Ontology

Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality as such, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations...

, and so Dreyfus

Hubert Dreyfus

Hubert Lederer Dreyfus is an American philosopher. He is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley....

calls this "the ontological assumption:" If this is false, then it raises doubts about what we can ultimately know and on what intelligent machines will ultimately be able to help us to do.

The primacy of background coping skills

In Mind Over Machine Dreyfus, written during the heyday of expert systems, Dreyfus analyzed the difference between human expertise and the programs that claimed to capture it. This expanded on ideas from What Computers Can't Do, where he had made a similar argument criticizing the "cognitive simulation" school of AI research practiced by Allen Newell

Allen Newell

Allen Newell was a researcher in computer science and cognitive psychology at the RAND corporation and at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science, Tepper School of Business, and Department of Psychology...

and Herbert Simon

Herbert Simon

in the 1960s.

Dreyfus argued that human problem solving and expertise depend on our background sense of the context, of what is important and interesting given the situation, rather than on the process of searching through combinations of possibilities to find what we need. Dreyfus would describe it in 1986 as the difference between "knowing-that" and "knowing-how", based on Heidegger's distinction of present-at-hand and ready-to-hand.

Knowing-that is our conscious, step-by-step problem solving abilities. We use these skills when we encounter a difficult problem that requires us to stop, step back and search through ideas one at time. At moments like this, the ideas become very precise and simple: they become context free symbols, which we manipulate using logic and language. These are the skills that Newell

Allen Newell

and Simon

Herbert Simon

had demonstrated with both psychological experiments and computer programs. Dreyfus agreed that their programs adequately imitated the skills he calls "knowing-that."

Knowing-how, on the other hand, is the way we deal with things normally. We take actions without using conscious symbolic reasoning at all, as when we recognize a face, drive ourselves to work or find the right thing to say. We seem to simply jump to the appropriate response, without considering any alternatives. This is the essence of expertise, Dreyfus argued: when our intuitions have been trained to the point that we forget the rules and simply "size up the situation" and react.

Our sense of the situation is based, Dreyfus argues, on our goals, our bodies and our culture—all of our unconscious intuitions, attitudes and knowledge about the world. This “context” or "background" (related to Heidegger's Dasein

Dasein

Dasein is a German word famously used by Martin Heidegger in his magnum opus Being and Time, which generally translates to being in its ontological and philosophical sense Dasein is a German word famously used by Martin Heidegger in his magnum opus Being and Time, which generally translates to...

) is a form of knowledge that is not stored in our brains symbolically, but intuitively in some way. It affects what we notice and what we don't notice, what we expect and what possibilities we don't consider: we discriminate between what is essential and inessential. The things that are inessential are relegated to our "fringe consciousness" (borrowing a phrase from William James

William James

William James was a pioneering American psychologist and philosopher who was trained as a physician. He wrote influential books on the young science of psychology, educational psychology, psychology of religious experience and mysticism, and on the philosophy of pragmatism...

): the millions of things we're aware of, but we're not really thinking about right now.

Dreyfus

Hubert Dreyfus

Hubert Lederer Dreyfus is an American philosopher. He is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley....

claimed that he could see no way that AI programs, as they were implemented in the 70s and 80s, could capture this background or do the kind of fast problem solving that it allows. He argued that our unconscious knowledge could never be captured symbolically. If AI could not find a way to address these issues, then it was doomed to failure, an exercise in "tree climbing with one's eyes on the moon."

History

Dreyfus began to formulate his critique in the early 1960s while he was a professor at MIT, then a hotbed of artificial intelligence research. His first publication on the subject is a half-page objection to a talk given by Herbert Simon

Herbert Simon

in the spring of 1961. Dreyfus was especially bothered, as a philosopher, that AI researchers seemed to believe they were on the verge of solving many long standing philosophical problems within a few years, using computers.

Alchemy and AI

In 1965, Dreyfus was hired (with his brother Stuart Dreyfus

Stuart Dreyfus

A native of Terre Haute, Indiana, Stuart E. Dreyfus is Professor Emeritus at University of California, Berkeley in the Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Department. While at the Rand Corporation he was a programmer of the JOHNNIAC computer. While at Rand he was coauthor, with Richard...

' help) by Paul Armer to spend the summer at RAND Corporation's Santa Monica facility, where he would write Alchemy and AI, the first salvo of his attack. Armer had thought he was hiring an impartial critic and was surprised when Dreyfus produced a scathing paper intended to demolish the foundations of the field. (Armer stated he was unaware of Dreyfus' previous publication.) Armer delayed publishing it, but ultimately realized that "just because it came to a conclusion you didn't like was no reason not to publish it." It finally came out as RAND Memo and soon became a best seller.

The paper flatly ridiculed AI research, comparing it to alchemy

Alchemy

Alchemy is an influential philosophical tradition whose early practitioners’ claims to profound powers were known from antiquity. The defining objectives of alchemy are varied; these include the creation of the fabled philosopher's stone possessing powers including the capability of turning base...

: a misguided attempt to change metals to gold based on a theoretical foundation that was no more than mythology and wishful thinking. It ridiculed the grandiose predictions of leading AI researchers, predicting that there were limits beyond which AI would not progress and intimating that those limits would be reached soon.

Reaction

The paper (according to Pamela McCorduck) "caused an uproar". The AI community's response was derisive and personal. Seymour Papert

Seymour Papert

Seymour Papert is an MIT mathematician, computer scientist, and educator. He is one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence, as well as an inventor of the Logo programming language....

dismissed one third of the paper as "gossip" and claimed that every quotation was deliberately taken out of context. Herbert Simon

Herbert Simon

accused Dreyfus of playing "politics" so that he could attach the prestigious RAND name to his ideas. Simon says "what I resent about this was the RAND name attached to that garbage".

Dreyfus, who taught at MIT

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...

, remembers that his colleagues working in AI "dared not be seen having lunch with me." Joseph Weizenbaum

Joseph Weizenbaum

Joseph Weizenbaum was a German-American author and professor emeritus of computer science at MIT.-Life and career:...

, the author of ELIZA

ELIZA

ELIZA is a computer program and an early example of primitive natural language processing. ELIZA operated by processing users' responses to scripts, the most famous of which was DOCTOR, a simulation of a Rogerian psychotherapist. Using almost no information about human thought or emotion, DOCTOR...

, felt his colleagues' treatment of Dreyfus

Hubert Dreyfus

Hubert Lederer Dreyfus is an American philosopher. He is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley....

was unprofessional and childish. Although he was an outspoken critic of Dreyfus' positions, he recalls "I became the only member of the AI community to be seen eating lunch with Dreyfus. And I deliberately made it plain that theirs was not the way to treat a human being."

The paper was the subject of a short in The New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...

magazine on June 11, 1966. The piece mentioned Dreyfus' contention that, while computers may be able to play checkers, no computer could yet play a decent game of chess. It reported with wry humor (as Dreyfus had) about the victory of a ten year old over the leading chess program, with "even more than its usual smugness."

In hopes of regaining AI's reputation, Seymour Papert

Seymour Papert

Seymour Papert is an MIT mathematician, computer scientist, and educator. He is one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence, as well as an inventor of the Logo programming language....

arranged a chess match between Dreyfus and Richard Greenblatt

Richard Greenblatt

Richard Greenblatt may refer to:*Richard Greenblatt , American computer programmer*Richard Greenblatt , Canadian actor/playwright...

's Mac Hack program. Dreyfus lost, much to Papert's satisfaction. An Association for Computing Machinery

Association for Computing Machinery

The Association for Computing Machinery is a learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 as the world's first scientific and educational computing society. Its membership is more than 92,000 as of 2009...

bulletin used the headline:

"A Ten Year Old Can Beat the Machine— Dreyfus: But the Machine Can Beat Dreyfus"

Dreyfus complained in print that he hadn't said a computer will never play chess, to which Herbert Simon

Herbert Simon

replied: "You should recognize that some of those who are bitten by your sharp-toothed prose are likely, in their human weakness, to bite back ... may I be so bold as to suggest that you could well begin the cooling---a recovery of your sense of humor being a good first step."

Vindicated

By the early 1990s several of Dreyfus' radical opinions had become mainstream.

Failed predictions. As Dreyfus had foreseen, the grandiose predictions of early AI researchers failed to come true. Fully intelligent machines (now known as "strong AI

Strong AI

Strong AI is artificial intelligence that matches or exceeds human intelligence — the intelligence of a machine that can successfully perform any intellectual task that a human being can. It is a primary goal of artificial intelligence research and an important topic for science fiction writers and...

") did not appear in the mid-1970s as predicted. HAL 9000

HAL 9000

HAL 9000 is the antagonist in Arthur C. Clarke's science fiction Space Odyssey saga. HAL is an artificial intelligence that interacts with the astronaut crew of the Discovery One spacecraft, usually represented as a red television-camera eye found throughout the ship...

(whose capabilities for natural language, perception and problem solving were based on the advice and opinions of Marvin Minsky

Marvin Minsky

Marvin Lee Minsky is an American cognitive scientist in the field of artificial intelligence , co-founder of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory, and author of several texts on AI and philosophy.-Biography:...

) did not appear in the year 2001. "AI researchers", writes Nicolas Fearn, "clearly have some explaining to do." Today researchers are far more reluctant to make the kind of predictions that were made in the early days. (Although some futurists, such as Ray Kurzweil, are still given to the same kind of optimism.)

The biological assumption, although common in the forties and early fifties, was no longer assumed by most AI researchers by the time Dreyfus published What Computers Can't Do. Although many still argue that it is essential to reverse-engineer the brain by simulating the action of neurons (such as Ray Kurzweil or Jeff Hawkins

Jeff Hawkins

Jeffrey Hawkins is the founder of Palm Computing and Handspring...

), they don't assume that neurons are essentially digital, but rather that the action of analog neurons can be simulated by digital machines to a reasonable level of accuracy. (Alan Turing

Alan Turing

Alan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS , was an English mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist. He was highly influential in the development of computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of "algorithm" and "computation" with the Turing machine, which played a...

had made this same observation as early as 1950.)

The psychological assumption and unconscious skills. Many AI researchers have come to agree that human reasoning does not consist primarily of high-level symbol manipulation. In fact, since Dreyfus first published his critiques in the 60s, AI research in general has moved away from high level symbol manipulation or "GOFAI

GOFAI

In artificial intelligence research, GOFAI describes the oldest original approach to achieving artificial intelligence, based on logic and problem solving...

", towards new models that are intended to capture more of our unconscious reasoning. Daniel Crevier

Daniel Crevier

writes that by 1993, unlike 1965, AI researchers no longer made the psychological assumption, and had continued forward without it. These new "sub-symbolic" approaches include:

Computational intelligence
Computational intelligence
Computational intelligence is a set of Nature-inspired computational methodologies and approaches to address complex problems of the real world applications to which traditional methodologies and approaches are ineffective or infeasible. It primarily includes Fuzzy logic systems, Neural Networks...

paradigms, such as neural nets, evolutionary algorithm
Evolutionary algorithm
In artificial intelligence, an evolutionary algorithm is a subset of evolutionary computation, a generic population-based metaheuristic optimization algorithm. An EA uses some mechanisms inspired by biological evolution: reproduction, mutation, recombination, and selection...

s and so on are mostly directed at simulated unconscious reasoning. Dreyfus himself agrees that these sub-symbolic methods can capture the kind of "tendencies" and "attitudes" that he considers essential for intelligence and expertise.
Research into commonsense knowledge has focussed on reproducing the "background" or context of knowledge.
Robotics
Robotics
Robotics is the branch of technology that deals with the design, construction, operation, structural disposition, manufacture and application of robots...

researchers like Hans Moravec
Hans Moravec
Hans Moravec is an adjunct faculty member at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University. He is known for his work on robotics, artificial intelligence, and writings on the impact of technology. Moravec also is a futurist with many of his publications and predictions focusing on...

and Rodney Brooks
Rodney Brooks
Rodney Allen Brooks is the former Panasonic professor of robotics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since 1986 he has authored a series of highly influential papers which have inaugurated a fundamental shift in artificial intelligence research...

were among the first to realize that unconscious skills would prove to be the most difficult to reverse engineer. (See Moravec's paradox
Moravec's paradox
Moravec's paradox is the discovery by artificial intelligence and robotics researchers that, contrary to traditional assumptions, high-level reasoning requires very little computation, but low-level sensorimotor skills require enormous computational resources. The principle was articulated by Hans...

.) Brooks would spearhead a movement in the late 80s that took direct aim at the use of high-level symbols, called Nouvelle AI
Nouvelle AI
During the late 1980s, the approach now known as nouvelle AI was pioneered at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory by Rodney Brooks. Nouvelle AI is different from classical artificial intelligence in that it tries not to reach for human-level performance, but rather tries to create systems...

. The situated
Situated
In artificial intelligence and cognitive science, the term situated refers to an agent which is embedded in an environment. The term situated is commonly used to refer to robots, but some researchers argue that software agents can also be situated if:...

movement in robotics
Robotics
Robotics is the branch of technology that deals with the design, construction, operation, structural disposition, manufacture and application of robots...

research attempts to capture our unconscious skills at perception and attention.

Ignored

Although clearly AI research has come to agree with Dreyfus, McCorduck writes that "my impression is that this progress has taken place piecemeal and in response to tough given problems, and owes nothing to Dreyfus."

The AI community, with a few exceptions, chose not to respond to Dreyfus directly. "He's to too silly to take seriously" a researcher told Pamela McCorduck. Marvin Minsky

Marvin Minsky

said of Dreyfus (and the other critiques coming from philosophy

Philosophy

Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...

) that "they misunderstand, and should be ignored." When Dreyfus expanded Alchemy and AI to book length and published it as What Computers Can't Do in 1972, no one from the AI community chose to respond (with the exception of a few critical reviews). McCorduck asks "If Dreyfus is so wrong-headed, why haven't the artificial intelligence people made more effort to contradict him?"

Part of the problem was the kind of philosophy that Dreyfus used in his critique. Dreyfus was an expert in modern European philosophers

Continental philosophy

(like Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty), as Pamela McCorduck points out. AI researchers of the 1960s, by contrast, based their understanding of the human mind on engineering principles and efficient problem solving techniques related to management science. On a fundamental level, they spoke a different language. Edward Feigenbaum

Edward Feigenbaum

Edward Albert Feigenbaum is a computer scientist working in the field of artificial intelligence. He is often called the "father of expert systems."...

complained "What does he offer us? Phenomenology! That ball of fluff. That cotton candy!" In 1965, there was simply too huge a gap between European philosophy and artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence

, a gap that has since been filled by cognitive science

Cognitive science

Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary scientific study of mind and its processes. It examines what cognition is, what it does and how it works. It includes research on how information is processed , represented, and transformed in behaviour, nervous system or machine...

, connectionism

Connectionism

and robotics

Robotics

Robotics is the branch of technology that deals with the design, construction, operation, structural disposition, manufacture and application of robots...

research. It would take many years before artificial intelligence researchers were able to address the issues that were important to continental philosophy, such as situated

Situated

In artificial intelligence and cognitive science, the term situated refers to an agent which is embedded in an environment. The term situated is commonly used to refer to robots, but some researchers argue that software agents can also be situated if:...

ness, embodiment

Embodiment

Embodied or embodiment may refer to:in psychology and philosophy,*Embodied cognition , a position in cognitive science and the philosophy of mind emphasizing the role that the body plays in shaping the mind...

, perception

Perception

Perception is the process of attaining awareness or understanding of the environment by organizing and interpreting sensory information. All perception involves signals in the nervous system, which in turn result from physical stimulation of the sense organs...

and gestalt.

Another problem was that he claimed (or seemed to claim) that AI would never be able to capture the human ability to understand context, situation or purpose in the form of rules. But (as Peter Norvig

Peter Norvig

Peter Norvig is an American computer scientist. He is currently the Director of Research at Google Inc.-Educational Background:...

and Stuart Russell

Stuart Russell

Stuart Russell may refer to:* Stuart Russell , British Conservative party politician, MP for Darwen 1935–1943* Stuart J. Russell , computer scientist known for his contributions to artificial intelligence...

would later explain), an argument of this form can not be won: just because one can not imagine the rules, this does not mean that no such rules exist. They quote Alan Turing

Alan Turing

's answer to all arguments similar to Dreyfus':

"we cannot so easily convince ourselves of the absence of complete laws of behaviour ... The only way we know of for finding such laws is scientific observation, and we certainly know of no circumstances under which we could say, 'We have searched enough. There are no such laws.'"

Dreyfus did not anticipate that AI researchers would realize their mistake and begin to work towards new solutions, moving away from the symbolic methods that Dreyfus criticized. In 1965, he did not imagine that such programs would one day be created, so he claimed AI was impossible. In 1965, AI researchers did not imagine that such programs were necessary, so they claimed AI was almost complete. Both were wrong.

A more serious issue was the impression that Dreyfus' critique was incorrigibly hostile. McCorduck writes "His derisiveness has been so provoking that he has estranged anyone he might have enlightened. And that's a pity." Daniel Crevier writes that "time has proven the accuracy and perceptiveness of some of Dreyfus's comments. Had he formulated them less aggressively, constructive actions they suggested might have been taken much earlier."

The grandiose promises of artificial intelligence

Dreyfus' four assumptions of artificial intelligence research

The primacy of background coping skills

History

Alchemy and AI

Reaction

Vindicated

Ignored

See also