Erik J. Larson
Lying: Sam Harris Buckled Under the Weight of Absolutism
Part 1: Having written a book on why it is always wrong to lie, he shamelessly buckled when a particular outcome mattered to him
Artificial Intelligence, Science and the Limits of Knowledge
In Part 3, I show that AI, like science, has limits. It depends on narrowing a problem: making it specific, discarding most possibilities, sealing it inside a representation and specification
Wide AI, While Still Just Automation, Is a Genuine Advance
Part 2: Truly general intelligence is still a mystery. In fact, it’s more mysterious now than it was in 2016
Surprise: Artificial intelligence Is Still Just Automation
I wrote this in 2016. And it is still true in 2025. A reflection in three partsWhen I first wrote this almost a decade ago, “AI” was already a cultural Rorschach test. To some, it was exciting and futuristic. To others, it was ominous, Orwellian, or just marketing spin. Automation, by contrast, was the unglamorous cousin that conjured images of soulless machines taking over the last shreds of human purpose. But from the start, my view was simple: what we call “AI” today is still just automation. And automation is not a mind. That argument has aged better than I expected. In the years since, we’ve seen an explosion of so-called AI — from self-driving cars to ChatGPT — yet the distinction between AI and automation remains almost universally misunderstood. Recently, computational linguist Emily Bender and Read More ›
Part 3: A Wren Arrives — and Ruffles Many a Feather
Dr. Wren, a cognitive scientist, identifies a problem with assuming that adding another ten thousand pigeons to the project will produce novel designs...
Part 2: Have the Superbirds Arrived? Are They Taking Over?
Dr. Avian now claims that his work with trained birds show that intelligence does not require inner models or internal representations, as formerly thought
Move Over, AI. Bird Brains Are Giving You a Run for Your Money
Could ten thousand birds develop a theory of mind just by scaling? A tale in three parts
Mistaking the World for a Puzzle Risks a New McCarthyism
In Part 2, I look at the imaginary world we invent when we succumb to puzzle thinking
AI’s Not “The Answer” In Our World of Mysteries, Not Puzzles
A focus on AI encourages us to see problems that are really mysteries as puzzles, which makes addressing them much harder
Is the Reverse Flynn Effect — Declining Intelligence — Real?
IQ tests were never meant to measure memorization or familiarity, yet that’s precisely what’s happening
The Reverse Flynn Effect and the Decline of Intelligence
How our modern world is making us dumber and why it doesn’t have to
Just When Human Reason is Most Productive — AI Makes Things Up
In Part 2, we see how the ability to handle only one type of truth limits AI. AI models are fundamentally untethered from reality
Why AI Breaks Down Where Human Creativity Begins
Part 1: AI can handle statements that are internally coherent but that is not the same thing as correspondence with reality
The Limits of What We Can Learn From Studying Creativity
In this third and final part of my essay, I look at what sets us apart from machines: Our capacity to leap from commonsense inferences to entirely new ways of understanding reality
Stranger Things: Why Mad Scientists Are Mad
At the highest levels, creativity seems to bypass the deliberate, structured thought process altogether
The Slow Decline of a Key Aspect of Creativity
The mechanization of mind is changing how we think about creativity — and not in a good way
Part 2: The Fiction of Generalizable AI: How to Game the System
Progress toward real generalization, by any substantive measure, is nil. Perhaps we should reexamine the very concept of the “I” in AI
The Fiction of Generalizable AI: A Tale in Two Parts
Why intelligence isn’t a linear scale — and why true generalization remains unsolved