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Thompson's Nature Letter (2025)
The January 2025 letter in Nature by Thompson and three colleagues arguing that AI will never achieve human-level intelligence — the enactive framework's most pointed intervention in contemporary AI debate.
In January 2025, Thompson, along with Federico Benitez, Cecilia Heyes, and Gualtiero Piccinini, published a letter in Nature titled 'Why AI will never be able to acquire human-level intelligence.' The word never carried the weight of the argument. Not not yet, not unlikely to, but never — because the argument was not about engineering timelines but about the conceptual coherence of attributing human-level intelligence to a computational system. The letter identified three capacities large language models appear to lack — generalization, representation, and selection — and argued that each is grounded in the organism's embodied existence in ways no computational architecture can replicate.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The letter's intervention cut beneath the familiar positions of the AI discourse. Accelerationists predicted general intelligence within the decade. Cautious optimists hedged their timelines. Ethicists worried about alignment without questioning the premise that alignment would eventually be necessary. Thompson and his co-authors refused the shared assumption on which all