Hubert Dreyfus

American philosopher at MIT and, from 1968, the University of California, Berkeley, and the best-known early critic of symbolic AIsymbolic AI, n.: An approach to AI that writes knowledge down as human-readable symbols and rules, such as 'every bird has wings', and reasons by manipulating them step by step instead of learning patterns from data.. His RAND Corporation paper 'Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence' (1965) and book 'What Computers Can't Do' (1972; revised as 'What Computers Still Can't Do', 1992) argued, drawing on Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein, that human expertise rests on embodied, situated skills and a background sense of what is relevant, which cannot be captured in explicit rules and symbols (see Dreyfus's critique of AIDreyfus's critique of AI, n.: The philosopher Hubert Dreyfus's argument, from the 1960s on, that rule-based AI could never match human intelligence, because much human skill rests on bodily know-how and intuition rather than explicit rules.). With his brother Stuart Dreyfus he proposed a five-stage model of skill acquisition in 'Mind over Machine' (1986). Dismissed by many AI researchers at the time, his objections were later echoed in work on the frame problemframe problem, n.: The difficulty of getting an AI to work out what does and does not change when something happens, without spelling out every one of the countless things that stay the same., embodied cognitionembodied cognition, n.: The idea that thinking is not something the brain does on its own: the body, its senses and movements, and its surroundings play a real part in how we think and understand. and connectionismconnectionism, n.: The view that minds and intelligent machines are best built from huge networks of simple, neuron-like units whose connection strengths are learned, rather than from explicit rules and symbols..