Hubert Dreyfus

Hubert Dreyfus

An American philosopher who became the field's most persistent early critic, arguing in his 1965 RAND paper "Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence" and his 1972 book What Computers Can't Do that symbolic AI rested on a mistaken view of the mind. Drawing on Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, he held that human competence is grounded in embodiment, context and skills that are never made explicit as rules, and so cannot be exhaustively formalised. Derided at the time, his objections anticipated the frame problem and the field's later turn toward statistical and embodied approaches. (See also: Symbolic AI, Rodney Brooks, AGI)