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Books

The Promise of Artificial Intelligence by Brian Cantwell Smith

Joshua Schrier asks whether artificial real intelligence is possible.

Can thinking be reduced to a series of logical rules which can be performed by anyone, even a machine? Enlightenment philosophers, including Gottfried Leibniz, Thomas Hobbes, and René Descartes, all considered the possibility of mechanical approaches to thinking. In our own era, computer technology has enabled artificial intelligence algorithms to outperform humans in tasks as diverse as playing chess, flying airplanes, diagnosing diseases, and recognizing cat pictures on the internet, among many others. Some have speculated that just a little bit more computer power would enable these algorithms to achieve general human-level, or perhaps even super-human, intelligence. Or is there instead a fundamental roadblock to human-level artificial intelligence?

In this engaging and conversational book, Brian Cantwell Smith, who is Reid Hoffman Professor of Artificial Intelligence and the Human at the University of Toronto, argues that no current or proposed forms of AI lead to genuine intelligence. According to Smith, the barrier is not a lack of computing power, but rather the ontological and epistemic realities about how electronic algorithms engage with and in the world, as I’ll explain.

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