Can computers think like humans? Reviewing Erik Larson's "The Myth of Artificial Intelligence"

In his recent book The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can't Think the Way We Do, AI researcher Erik J. Larson defends the claim that, as things stand today, there's no plausible approach in AI research that can lead to generalized, human-like intelligence. It's important to understand what the author is claiming- and what he's not claiming. He's not claiming that computers can never think like humans, as some philosophers of mind have claimed. Rather, his position is- if there's indeed a way to make computers think like humans, we haven't the foggiest what that is. Our current approaches- no matter how promising they might seem- are all dead ends. He contrasts this with the prevailing optimism about AI: the perception that current approaches are on the path to generalized intelligence, and the problems of this approach are, at least in theory, solvable. Thought this way, human-like computers seem just a matter of time. Larson, on the other hand, argues that even the fundamental theoretical principles of current AI approaches are non-starters. All of the current approaches in AI (or at least the most promising ones) are based on a certain model of thinking: inductive inference.