ai-critiquephenomenologyembodiment
Hubert Dreyfus’s revised critique of artificial intelligence argues that the field’s founding assumption — that intelligence is formal rule-following over symbols — mistakes a late, derivative mode of thought for the whole of it. Drawing on Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, he contends that most human competence is embodied and situated: skillful coping in a world we never had to represent completely, an absorbed background know-how no rulebook captures.
Decades after its first edition predicted the limits of symbolic AI, the book remains a standing challenge to any architecture, however different from that early paradigm, that tries to build understanding out of explicit representations rather than a body’s ongoing engagement with a world.
