Turing's Mistake: Escaping the Yoke of Unintelligent Machines

AI is reshaping the world, and no one is certain where it's taking us. Are we machines? Are better ones coming to replace us? This book traces this angst to two assumptions Alan Turing proposed in 1950: that intelligence is disembodied, and that its presence can be measured by the Turing Test. The AI field's pursuit of Artificial General Intelligence has ignored a critical gap: human tacit knowledge, our embodied understandings and skills that cannot be precisely described and known by machines. Non-human machine intelligence is already emerging in AI agentic networks and is well on its way to dragging us into an unwanted and unwelcome world where not-very-intelligent machines force conformity to their goals. For readers unsettled by AI's momentum, this book offers a way to reclaim the human capacities, care, understanding, and respect, that no machine can have.