Hubert Dreyfus's views on artificial intelligence

In the 21st century, statistics-based approaches to machine learning simulate the way that the brain uses unconscious process to perceive, notice anomalies and make quick judgements.

Historian and AI researcher Daniel Crevier writes: "time has proven the accuracy and perceptiveness of some of Dreyfus's comments.

"[5] In Alchemy and AI (1965) and What Computers Can't Do (1972), Dreyfus summarized the history of artificial intelligence and ridiculed the unbridled optimism that permeated the field.

[8] 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.

[9] "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.

Dreyfus was able to refute the biological assumption by citing research in neurology that suggested that the action and timing of neuron firing had analog components.

In Mind Over Machine (1986), 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 and Herbert A. 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.

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.

The human sense of the situation, according to Dreyfus, is based on our goals, our bodies and our culture—all of our unconscious intuitions, attitudes and knowledge about the world.

Dreyfus does not believe 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.

"[15] Dreyfus began to formulate his critique in the early 1960s while he was a professor at MIT, then a hotbed of artificial intelligence research.

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.

[18] The paper flatly ridiculed AI research, comparing it to alchemy: a misguided attempt to change metals to gold based on a theoretical foundation that was no more than mythology and wishful thinking.

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.

"[20] In hope of restoring AI's reputation, Seymour Papert arranged a chess match between Dreyfus and Richard Greenblatt's Mac Hack program.

[26] An Association for Computing Machinery bulletin[27] used the headline: Dreyfus complained in print that he hadn't said a computer will never play chess, to which Herbert A. 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.

HAL 9000 (whose capabilities for natural language, perception and problem solving were based on the advice and opinions of Marvin Minsky) did not appear in the year 2001.

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.

In fact, since Dreyfus first published his critiques in the 60s, AI research in general has moved away from high level symbol manipulation, towards new models that are intended to capture more of our unconscious reasoning.

Daniel Crevier writes that by 1993, unlike 1965, AI researchers "no longer made the psychological assumption",[13] and had continued forward without it.

Research in psychology and economics has been able to show that Dreyfus' (and Heidegger's) speculation about the nature of human problem solving was essentially correct.

McCorduck asks "If Dreyfus is so wrong-headed, why haven't the artificial intelligence people made more effort to contradict him?

[40] 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.

It would take many years before artificial intelligence researchers were able to address the issues that were important to continental philosophy, such as situatedness, embodiment, perception and gestalt.

They quote Alan Turing's answer to all arguments similar to Dreyfus's:"we cannot so easily convince ourselves of the absence of complete laws of behaviour ...