PERSON
Hubert Dreyfus
American philosopher (1929–2017) who wielded Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology as a philosophical instrument against AI's foundational claims, translating Sense and Non-Sense and writing What Computers Can't Do.
Hubert Dreyfus was an American philosopher whose lifelong project connected Continental phenomenology — particularly the work of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty — to the research program of artificial intelligence. He personally translated Merleau-Ponty's Sense and Non-Sense into English in the early 1960s, absorbing the phenomenological framework that would structure his critical engagement with AI. His 1972 book What Computers Can't Do (revised 1992 as What Computers Still Can't Do) applied Merleau-Pontian analysis to argue that human intelligence depends on 'informal and unconscious processes' — embodied skills, contextual understanding, background assumptions — that symbolic AI could not replicate. The failures of expert systems in the 1980s vindicated his critique, though Dreyfus was ambivalent about the subsequent rise of neural networks, which exhibited some Merleau-Pontian features while remaining categorically limited.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Dreyfus's critique of AI was never mere dismissal. He took AI seriously as a research program and engaged extensively with its practitioners — sometimes productively, sometimes contentiously. His MIT RAND paper Alchemy