The Myth of Machine Intelligence

This book explains, in terms that non-experts can easily understand, why the fashionable hopes and fears often vested in AI are illusory. Machines, including computers, will never be able to think, much less plot to take over the world and dispose of the humans who created them. Machines cannot understand anything, and they cannot have emotions or desires.

The authors demonstrate that an artificial intelligence that could equal or exceed human intelligence―sometimes called artificial general intelligence (AGI)―is for reasons of mathematics and physics, forever impossible. The fundamental reason is that mathematics and physics are only applicable to a small sliver of the universe: they cannot cope with what are called ‘complex systems’.

Many influential philosophers and online influencers promote the story that we are approaching a Singularity (a term borrowed from the astrophysics of the Big Bang), where artificial intelligences will become able to think for themselves, and will then design new superintelligences even cleverer than they are, capable of indefinitely improving on their own level of intelligence, and harboring an ominous threat to human existence.

Landgrebe and Smith show that this story is at odds with reality. AI products, while they can be very useful and demonstrate the impressive ingenuity and creativity of their human designers, are not truly intelligent at all, and cannot match the intelligence of a chimpanzee, much less a human.

In supporting their claim, the authors marshal evidence from mathematics, physics, computer science, philosophy, linguistics, and biology, setting up their argument around three central questions: What are the essential marks of human intelligence? What is it that researchers try to do when they attempt to achieve “artificial intelligence”? And why, after sixty years of work on AI, are our most common interactions with AI, for example with our bank’s computers, still so frustrating? All the essentials of these multiple disciplines are spelled out with tremendous clarity and wit.

Landgrebe and Smith show how widespread fear about AI’s potential to bring about radical changes in the nature of human beings and in the human social order is founded on provable error. There is still much that so-called ‘AI’ can achieve which will benefit humankind. But these benefits will be accomplished without the aid of entities that are intellectually more powerful than humans.

Jobst Landgrebe and Barry Smith made a huge impact with their scholarly study, Why Machines Will Never Rule the World: Artificial Intelligence without Fear (2022), which rapidly went into a second edition and became an indispensable standard work. Having decided that a more popular explanation was needed, aimed at a broader readership, they decided to write The Myth of Machine Intelligence. Under an assumed name (Arnold Schelsky), Landgrebe also wrote the exciting and controversial book, The Hype Cycle: Uppers and Downers in Our Bipolar Culture (2025).