alt Hacker NewsI edited that sentence to try and clarify a bit, but Dreyfus was a continental philosopher out of Berkley active basically from the 1950s to the 2010s. He engaged in decades of friendly debates with other philosophers about the limits of computers.
When he described those limits, he always frustrated computer scientists and analytic philosophers because he spoke in a kind of informal philosophical vocabulary and didn't really formalize his ideas. So he would say computers didn't have things like "tacit knowledge" or "insight" and he railed against "symbol manipulation". Famously he declared chess would never surpass human expert play. He wrote a book called "What Computers Can't Do" and another called "What Computer's Still Can't Do".
I personally think his argument was laughably wrong if well intentioned. But some people think it was respectable. I think in the present day, he's often rehabilitated with a kind of apologetic reinterpretation, such that things like transformers, weights, vectors, etc were what he really meant all along.
I think he was not wrong that some higher layer of sophistication would prove to be necessary, but he was wrong, I think definitively, to think that "symbol manipulation" of computers was a kind of category error. Even today's best models are still running on logic gates over 1's and 0's, and it was his failure of imagination to doubt that those could be the conceptual bedrock for AI, tacit knowledge and all.
He passed away in 2017, which is too bad because I would have loved to have seen his interpretation of things like GPT-6 Astra.
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> Famously he declared chess would never surpass human expert play. He wrote a book called "What Computers Can't Do" and another called "What Computer's Still Can't Do".
He never made such a claim. In the introduction to the 1972 print of this book he discusses the forecasts from Turing to his time of computers' abilities to play chess and the then state of the art. He criticizes the early optimism in 1950s mentioning that in 1957 H. Simon though in 10 years computers would excel in chess.
Dreyfus goes on to discuss the history of forecasts and progress in computer chess in a nuanced and highly informative analysis.
Whatever your opinion of his work I don't think it's fair to say his arguments are "laughably wrong" at any turn. I haven't read his books in detail but from what I know he made great contributions to the dialogue about technology and I don't know any instance of his making crass predictions or anything that he wrote that could be labelled "laughable".
Ah I see! The change helps.
> think that "symbol manipulation" of computers was a kind of category error
This is where we do drift off into the semantic bog. If there is tacit knowledge in an LLM, then where is it? It must be in the weights, and it must have somehow come from the training data. Therefore the weights represent "compressed" knowledge. Is that then not "tacit" since it's explicitly encoded?