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The AI Delusion
In *The AI Delusion*, economist Gary Smith dismantles the hype surrounding artificial intelligence, arguing that today’s AI systems are not truly intelligent—they’re just sophisticated tools for data matching and brute-force computation. Using vivid examples from Jeopardy!’s Watson, chess-playing programs like AlphaZero, and real-world failures in medicine, stock trading, and hiring, Smith shows that machines lack human understanding: they can’t grasp context, distinguish meaningful patterns from random coincidences, or apply common sense. He exposes the dangers of data mining, from the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy (cherry-picking data to fit theories) to overfitting models that work perfectly on old data but fail catastrophically on new inputs. Smith also warns against blind trust in black-box algorithms, which perpetuate bias, enable unfair decisions, and risk catastrophic errors in high-stakes fields like healthcare and military operations. Ultimately, he emphasizes that human reasoning, critical thinking, and common sense are irreplaceable—we should use AI as a tool, not mistake it for a thinking, feeling counterpart.
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