HubertDreyfus

Hubert Dreyfus has been a critic of artificial intelligence research since the 1960s. In a series of papers and books, including Alchemy and AI (1965), What Computers Can't Do (1972, 1979, 1991) and Mind over Machine (1986), he presented a caustic assessment of AI's progress and a careful critique of the philosophical foundations of the field. Dreyfus' objections are discussed in most introductions to the philosophy of artificial intelligence, including Russell & Norvig (2003), the standard AI textbook, and in Fearn (2007), a survey of contemporary philosophy.[1]

Dreyfus argued that human intelligence and expertise depend primarily on unconscious instincts rather than conscious symbolic manipulation, and that these unconscious skills could never be captured in formal rules. His critique was based on the insights of modern continental philosophers such as Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, and was directed at the first wave of AI research which used high level formal symbols to represent reality and tried to reduce intelligence to symbol manipulation.

Dreyfus 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, and so Dreyfus 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.