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What Computers Still Can't Do
Dreyfus's 1972 landmark, revised in 1992, arguing that human intelligence is fundamentally embodied, situated, and rooted in practical engagement with the world—and therefore cannot be replicated by systems that manipulate symbols according to formal rules.
What Computers Can't Do (1972) and its revised edition What Computers Still Can't Do (1992) together constitute the most sustained philosophical critique of artificial intelligence ever produced. The book extended the argument of Alchemy and AI into a full-length treatment grounded in the phenomenology of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Dreyfus identified four foundational assumptions of AI research—the biological, psychological, epistemological, and ontological assumptions—and argued that each was philosophically untenable. The book became a lightning rod: ridiculed in the 1970s, grudgingly respected in the 1980s, partially vindicated in the 1990s, and, with the arrival of large language models, newly contested in ways Dreyfus himself lived just long enough to see begin.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The 1972 edition appeared at the peak of symbolic AI's institutional confidence. Research groups at MIT, Stanford, and Carnegie Mellon were predicting that machines would achieve human-level intelligence within a decade or two. Funding was