Philosophy

The Philosophy Department and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences are proud to present the first talk of our Philosophy and AI speaker series, by Erik J. Larson, author of The Myth of Artificial Intelligence. Please see below for information about the talk. A reception will follow in Griffin-Floyd 303.

Title: The Myth of Artificial Intelligence

Abstract: Futurists insist that AI will soon eclipse the capacities of the most gifted human mind. What hope do we have against super intelligent machines? But we aren’t really on the path to developing intelligent machines. In fact, we don’t even know where that path might be. In my talk, I’ll give a tour of the landscape of AI to show how far we are from superintelligence, and what it would take to get there. Ever since Alan Turing, AI enthusiasts have equated artificial intelligence with human intelligence. 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. Human intelligence is a web of best guesses, given what we know about the world. We haven’t a clue how to program this kind of intuitive reasoning, known as abduction. Yet it is the heart of common sense. That’s why Alexa (and ChatGPT) doesn’t understand what you are asking, and why AI can only take us so far. I’ll also explain how AI hype is both bad science and bad for science. A culture of invention thrives on exploring unknowns, not overselling existing methods. Inductive AI will continue to improve at narrow tasks, but if we want to make real progress, we will need to start by more fully appreciating the only true intelligence we know—our own.