Hubert Dreyfus

Hubert Dreyfus is an American philosopher and the author of the 1992 book What Computers Still Can't Do (ISBN 0262540673 ) (a revision of What Computers Can't Do (1972) ISBN 0060906138 (2nd ed., 1979)), which exposes a strong argumentation against the ArtificialIntelligence principles, mainly based on the "Phenomenology" philosophical mainstream (Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre). As such, this book was very controversial. In the French edition of the book, four amongst the most influential pioneers in the AI field in France try to find counterarguments to Dreyfus's while they generally admit that he asks very pertinent and embarrassing questions.

Some years later, TerryWinograd and FernandoFlores? took much of his argumentation again (in particular the fateful lack of embodiment in computing) in a book called UnderstandingComputersAndCognition (1987) to explain why AI programs regularly failed to reach their authors' prognoses, at least in a real-life context. -- JeanMichelAndre