> tacit knowledge was exactly the thing Hubert Dreyfus spent a career insisting would never happen
Could you elaborate on this? It sounds like something any anthropologist would laugh at; there's always an oral culture.
Could you elaborate on this? It sounds like something any anthropologist would laugh at; there's always an oral culture.
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.
> 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?
I think what it comes down to, is trying to turn the specialness of human intelligence into undefinable magic, essentially playing god of the gaps with the concept of human insight. So by design, it has to be something that can't be amenable to any formal representation like weights.
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".
He thought that the complexity of chess rendered it solvable in principle but "uncomputable" in practice. You're right that he was speaking to the times he was familiar with, and what he meant by "impossible in practice" was something like letting a 1Mhz computer explore all the possible chess moves from now until the heat death of the universe. Relying on that to insist that computers defeating humans in his lifetime was consistent with what he envisioned stretches past charitability and into sophistry.
And I don't think you can extend him that charity without doing the same in the other direction, which would also collapse his basic thesis. Dreyfus was disproportionately preoccupied with retelling the failures of the 1950s over and over again using them to represent the whole of computing while the world moved on, and extending the same charitable repairs in favor of AI research make it something less easily caricatured, and still based on the same logic gates and 0s and 1s he was criticizing.
If that's not enough, Dreyfus explicitly said that what was lacking in chess programs was (1) any practical ability to do the brute forcing needed, (2) any kind of nim-style logical shortcuts around brute forcing or (3) any kind of expert level heuristics because he categorically believed those simply weren't programmable. And he believed that those exhausted the options. [1]
There's no version of this that can be correct because even if you think he's right that chess engines got better by progressing to some different conceptual paradigm, that paradigm is still embodied in same logic gates and 1's and 0's that he thought only pertained to prior paradigms he was criticizing. He was wrong to assume such things as "heuristics" were outside of that scope.
1. https://repository.essex.ac.uk/42372/1/Martin%20and%20Willia...
I do object to calling his writing "laughable".
Thank you for the article, it seems quite interesting on skimming and I will save it for later.