TEHRAN -- Technology book, ‘The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can’t Think the Way We Do’ (2021) by American writer, tech entrepreneur and computer scientist Erik J. Larson has been published in Persian.
The book which exposes the vast gap between the actual science underlying AI and the dramatic claims being made for it, has been translated into Persian by Muhammad Mozaffarpour. Tehran-based Amir Kabir Publishing has released ‘The Myth of Artificial Intelligence’ in 356 pages.
Ever since Alan Turing, AI enthusiasts have equated artificial intelligence with human intelligence. A computer scientist working at the forefront of natural language processing, Erik Larson takes us on a tour of the landscape of AI to reveal why this is a profound mistake.
AI works on inductive reasoning, crunching data sets to predict outcomes. But humans don’t correlate data sets. We make conjectures, informed by context and experience. And we haven’t a clue how to program that kind of intuitive reasoning, which lies at the heart of common sense.
Futurists insist AI will soon eclipse the capacities of the most gifted mind, but Larson shows how far we are from superintelligence—and what it would take to get there.
“Larson worries that we’re making two mistakes at once, defining human intelligence down while overestimating what AI is likely to achieve…Another concern is learned passivity: our tendency to assume that AI will solve problems and our failure, as a result, to cultivate human ingenuity.” —David A. Shaywitz, Wall Street Journal
“A convincing case that artificial general intelligence—machine-based intelligence that matches our own—is beyond the capacity of algorithmic machine learning because there is a mismatch between how humans and machines know what they know.” —Sue Halpern, New York Review of Books
Erik J. Larson has written for The Atlantic, The Hedgehog Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Wired, and professional journals.
His other projects include two DARPA-funded startups, the most recent a company that provides influence rankings for colleges and universities using an influence ranking algorithm.