Why AI Geniuses Haven't Created True Thinking Machines

As we saw yesterday, artificial intelligence (AI) has enjoyed a a string of unbroken successes against humans. But these are successes in games where the map is the territory. That fact hints at the problem tech philosopher and futurist George Gilder raises in Gaming AI (free download here). Whether all human activities can be treated that way successfully is an entirely different question. As Gilder puts it, "AI is a system built on the foundations of computer logic, and when Silicon Valley's AI theorists push the logic of their case to a "singularity," they defy the most crucial findings of twentieth-century mathematics and computer science." Here is one of the crucial findings they defy (or ignore): Philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) pointed out that, generally, mental activity comes in threes, not twos (so he called it triadic).