Textbook of AI

Abstract. The 1992 update of Dreyfus's 1972 What Computers Can't Do. Drawing on Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, Dreyfus argues that symbolic AI must fail because intelligence is grounded in embodied skill, situated context, and the holistic background of meaning that cannot be formalised as explicit rules. The book was savagely received by the AI community at the time and is now widely regarded as having anticipated the failure of GOFAI symbolic-rule systems and the eventual ascendancy of statistical, embodied and connectionist approaches.