Reader Dave Trevor kindly calls my attention to this useful account of the early critique of AI by Hubert Dreyfus and its aftermath. Dreyfus came to this via his study of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, and the points remain relevant. An excerpt:

The paper argued that the attempt to analyse intelligent behaviour in digital computer language systematically excluded three fundamental human forms of information processing: what Dreyfus called fringe consciousness, essence/accident discrimination, and ambiguity tolerance. Of four distinct types of intelligent activity he identified, only two did not presuppose these human forms of information processing and could therefore be programmed. Significant developments in the remaining two areas would await an entirely different sort of computer, the only existing prototype for which was the little-understood human brain.¹¹

The philosophical backing for all this came from the phenomenological tradition Dreyfus had spent his career studying. Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger had argued, against the Cartesian tradition, that human beings do not relate to the world primarily through explicit representations and conscious rule-following. We act from habit, from context, from a kind of bodily familiarity with situations that is never made fully explicit and that Dreyfus doubted could ever be made explicit. When a carpenter reaches for a hammer, in Dreyfus’s reading of Heidegger, he does not first consult a mental database of objects and their properties. The hammer is encountered as a thing-with-which-to-hammer, its meaning inseparable from the carpenter’s situation and purpose. The world, in this view, is not a collection of independent facts waiting to be symbolically represented. It is a structured field of significance that human beings inhabit before they begin to reason about it.¹²

Underpinning this was a distinction that Gilbert Ryle had drawn in The Concept of Mind (1949): the difference between knowing-that, propositional knowledge, the kind that can be written down as rules, and knowing-how, the practical ability that an expert exercises without being able to articulate it as a set of instructions. Ryle had used it against Cartesian dualism; Dreyfus turned it against AI.¹³ The field, he argued, had succeeded precisely where knowing-that applied: formal logic, theorem-proving, games with explicit rules. It had made no progress where knowing-how was required. And most of what humans do, most of the time, is knowing-how.

Please read the entire essay before commenting. And only comment if you’ve thought seriously about these issues! No armchair reactions please!