"Exposes the vast gap between the actual science underlying AI and the dramatic claims being
made for it." -John Horgan "If you want to know about AI read this book...It shows how a
supposedly futuristic reverence for Artificial Intelligence retards progress when it denigrates
our most irreplaceable resource for any future progress: our own human intelligence." -Peter
Thiel Ever since Alan Turing AI enthusiasts have equated artificial intelligence with human
intelligence. A computer scientist working at the forefront of natural language processing
Erik Larson takes us on a tour of the landscape of AI to reveal why this is a profound mistake.
AI works on inductive reasoning crunching data sets to predict outcomes. But humans don't
correlate data sets. We make conjectures informed by context and experience. And we haven't a
clue how to program that kind of intuitive reasoning which lies at the heart of common sense.
Futurists insist AI will soon eclipse the capacities of the most gifted mind but Larson shows
how far we are from superintelligence-and what it would take to get there. "Larson worries
that we're making two mistakes at once defining human intelligence down while overestimating
what AI is likely to achieve...Another concern is learned passivity: our tendency to assume
that AI will solve problems and our failure as a result to cultivate human ingenuity." -David
A. Shaywitz Wall Street Journal "A convincing case that artificial general
intelligence-machine-based intelligence that matches our own-is beyond the capacity of
algorithmic machine learning because there is a mismatch between how humans and machines know
what they know." -Sue Halpern New York Review of Books
