stine@EDN-VAX.ARPA (Bob Stine) (02/04/86)
From: Bob Stine <stine@edn-vax.arpa> "Why Computers May Never Think Like People," a recent diatribe by the brothers Dreyfus, has several problems. First and foremost is that AI research is implicitly identified as the development of rule-based systems. All of the well known limitations of rule-based systems are inappropriately attributed to AI research as a whole. There is a deeper problem with the article, that perhaps springs from a misguided humanism. The article claims that machines will never duplicate human performance in cognitive tasks, because humans have "intuition." These passages would read very much the same if 'magic' were substituted for 'intuition' - "Human begins have a magic intelligence that reasoning machines simply cannot match." "... a boxer seems to recognize the moment to begin an attack... ... the boxer is using his magic". The Dreyfus brothers claim that they are not "Luddites," that they are not opposed to technology per se, but just to wasting time and money on AI research. The basis of their position is that some aspect of human intelligence is inherently beyond human comprehension. There certainly are things that humans will never know. But no one thing is inherently unknowable.