Ezra's Round Table on 9/2/22: Dr. Barry Smith

The Ontology of Complex Systems and the Limits of Artificial Intelligence:
The book Why Machines Will Not Rule the World (published August 2022), sets out a theory of systems in general and of complex systems in particular, which we apply in the construction of a detailed account of that feature of human organisms we call intelligence. We can infer from this account an understanding of how an artificial intelligence would need to be structured in order to emulate human intelligence. The upshot is that what AI researchers call 'AGI' (or general artificial intelligence) is impossible, and that AI systems will be forever confined to certain narrow lanes, of which the most conspicuous current examples are the DeepMind Go and the AlphaFold protein structure algorithms.