A counter-current book that dismantles the myths that surround Artificial Intelligence, myths that announce exceptional achievements with which it will soon surpass human intelligence.
The messiahs of the future insist that Artificial Intelligence will soon eclipse the capabilities of the most talented human minds. According to them, there is no hope left, since the advance of superintelligent machines is unstoppable. But the reality is that we are neither on the path towards the development of intelligent machines nor do we even know where that path could be found.

Erik Larson is a pioneering scientist and researcher in natural language processing, as well as a technology entrepreneur working at the forefront of AI. In this book he accompanies us on a tour of the current panorama of this field to demonstrate how far we really are from superintelligence and what it would take to get there.

Since Alan Turing, artificial intelligence enthusiasts have fallen into the profound error of equating it with human intelligence. But AI works with inductive reasoning, processing data sets to predict outcomes, while humans do not correlate data sets: we make guesses based on information from context and experience. We have no idea how to program this type of intuition-based reasoning, known as abductive reasoning.

The real problem is that the hype around AI is not only bad science, it is also bad for science. Innovation culture flourishes when it explores the unknown, not when it exaggerates the virtues of existing technologies. Inductive AI will continue to get better at performing specific tasks, but if we want to make real progress, we must start by fully appreciating the only true intelligence we know: our own.