“It’s insidious, the way your own success can stifle you. As our machines get faster and ingest more data, we allow ourselves to be dumber. Instead of wrestling with our hardest problems in earnest, we can just plug in billions of examples of them. Which is a bit like using a graphing calculator to do your high-school calculus homework—it works great until you need to actually understand calculus.”
-What is real artificial intelligence? And is it even possible? Pulitzer Prize-winner Douglas Hofstadter thinks we haven’t been trying hard enough to solve the real mystery of the human mind (via The Atlantic). Read more from James Somers in the Longreads Archive.
***
We need your help to get to 5,000 Longreads Members.
Get the Longreads Weekly Email