The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can’t Think the Way We Do

General (non-narrow) intelligence of the sort we all display daily is not an algorithm running in our heads, but calls on the entire cultural, historical, and social context within which we think and act in the world.

World knowledge, as Bar-Hillel pointed out, couldn’t really be supplied to computers—at least not in any straightforward, engineering manner—because the “number of facts we human beings know is, in a certain very pregnant sense, infinite.

First, intelligence is situational—there is no such thing as general intelligence. Your brain is one piece in a broader system which includes your body, your environment, other humans, and culture as a whole. Second, it is contextual—far from existing in a vacuum, any individual intelligence will always be both defined and limited by its environme