What Computers Still Can't Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason

Front Cover
MIT Press, Oct 30, 1992 - Computers - 408 pages
When it was first published in 1972, Hubert Dreyfus's manifesto on the inherent inability of disembodied machines to mimic higher mental functions caused an uproar in the artificial intelligence community. The world has changed since then. Today it is clear that "good old-fashioned AI," based on the idea of using symbolic representations to produce general intelligence, is in decline (although several believers still pursue its pot of gold), and the focus of the Al community has shifted to more complex models of the mind. It has also become more common for AI researchers to seek out and study philosophy. For this edition of his now classic book, Dreyfus has added a lengthy new introduction outlining these changes and assessing the paradigms of connectionism and neural networks that have transformed the field.

At a time when researchers were proposing grand plans for general problem solvers and automatic translation machines, Dreyfus predicted that they would fail because their conception of mental functioning was naive, and he suggested that they would do well to acquaint themselves with modern philosophical approaches to human beings. What Computers Can't Do was widely attacked but quietly studied. Dreyfus's arguments are still provocative and focus our attention once again on what it is that makes human beings unique.

 

Contents

Introduction to the MIT Press Edition
ix
Acknowledgments
liii
Introduction
67
Ten Years of Research in Artificial
89
Phase II 19621967 Semantic Information Processing
130
Conclusion
149
Introduction
155
The Psychological Assumption
163
The Ontological Assumption
206
Conclusion
225
Introduction
231
Orderly Behavior Without Recourse
256
The Situation as a Function of Human Needs
272
Conclusion
281
Notes
307
Index
346

The Epistemological Assumption
189

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About the author (1992)

Hubert L. Dreyfus is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley.

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