Overview

Futurists insist that AI will soon eclipse the capacities of the most gifted human mind. What hope do we have against superintelligent 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. Erik Larson takes us on 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 can't understand what you are asking, and why AI can only take us so far. Larson argues that 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.

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Discusses how widely publicized misconceptions about intelligence and inference have led AI research down narrow paths that are limiting innovation and scientific discoveries. -- TechTalks 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. -- Wall Street Journal Makes a convincing case that...AI can't account for the qualitative, nonmeasurable, idiosyncratic, messy stuff of life. -- New York Review of Books

Author Information

Erik J. Larson is a computer scientist and tech entrepreneur. The founder of two DARPA-funded AI startups, he works on core issues in natural language processing and machine learning. He has written for The Atlantic and for professional journals and has tested the technical boundaries of artificial intelligence through his work with the IC2 tech incubator at the University of Texas at Austin. Perry Daniels is an award-winning, classically trained actor from Atlanta, Georgia, with over a decade of experience on stage, screen, and lurking mysteriously behind the microphone of his home studio. An audiobook junkie and mimic with a love of dialects, Perry strives to bring sincerity, energy, depth, and a focus on performance to his narration.

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