Turing's Mistake

AI is sweeping away familiar cultures and we have no idea where it is taking us. The older generation tends to stick up for humanity and the younger generation for post-humanity. It is a serious tension. Everywhere there is a mood of unsettlement at not knowing where the unstoppable momentum of AI will go and whether we will like the outcome. For the first time in the history of humanity, we do not really have a good grip on what the role of humans is on the planet.

This predicament can be traced to widespread acceptance of two assumptions proposed by Alan Turing in 1950 when he asked, “Can computers think?”: that intelligence is disembodied and its presence can be determined by the Turing test. The AI field has been obsessed by a quest for Artificial General Intelligence, abbreviated AGI, in fulfillment of Turing’s proposals. This book argues that AI has ignored a gaping hole: the issue of tacit knowledge, which is essential for human intelligence and can never be known by machines. The seekers of AGI have a long wait ahead.

For the rest of us, non-human machine intelligence is already emerging in AI agentic networks and is well on its way to dragging us into an unwanted and unwelcome world where not-very-intelligent machines force conformity to their goals. We can escape this yoke by renouncing the idea that we are a form of machine. We can celebrate and reawaken the powers we have, such as care, understanding, and respect, that no machine can have.