Hubert Dreyfus

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Lore & Background

Dreyfus was born on October 15, 1929, in Terre Haute, Indiana, to Stanley S. and Irene (Lederer) Dreyfus. He attended Harvard University from 1947. With a senior honors thesis on Causality and Quantum Theory (for which W. V. O. Quine was the main examiner) he was awarded a B.A. summa cum laude in 1951 and joined Phi Beta Kappa. He was awarded an M.A. in 1952. On a Harvard Sheldon traveling fellowship, Dreyfus studied at the University of Freiburg from 1953 to 1954, during which he had an interview with Martin Heidegger. Sean D. Kelly records that Dreyfus found the meeting 'disappointing.' Between 1956 and 1957, Dreyfus undertook research at the Husserl Archives at the University of Louvain on a Fulbright Fellowship. After acting as an instructor in philosophy at Brandeis University (1957–1959), he attended the École Normale Supérieure on a French government grant (1959–1960). From 1960, first as an instructor, then as an assistant and then associate professor, Dreyfus taught philosophy at MIT. In 1964, with his dissertation *Husserl's Phenomenology of Perception*, he obtained his Ph.D. from Harvard. Also in 1964, and whilst still at MIT, he was employed as a consultant by the RAND Corporation to review the work of Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon in the field of artificial intelligence. This resulted in the publication, in 1965, of the "famously combative" *Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence*. In 1968, although he had been granted tenure, Dreyfus left MIT and became an associate professor of philosophy at UC Berkeley, winning that same year the Harbison Prize for Outstanding Teaching. In 1972 he was promoted to full professor. Though Dreyfus retired from his chair in 1994, he continued as professor of philosophy in the Graduate School (and held, from 1999, a joint appointment in the rhetoric department). He continued to teach philosophy at UC Berkeley until his last class in December 2016. Dreyfus was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001. He was also awarded an honorary doctorate by Erasmus University. Dreyfus died on April 22, 2017. His younger brother and sometimes collaborator, Stuart Dreyfus, is a professor emeritus of industrial engineering and operations research at UC Berkeley.

Reader's Guide

Dreyfus's critique of artificial intelligence concerns what he considers to be the four primary assumptions of AI research: the biological assumption (the brain is analogous to computer hardware and the mind to software), the psychological assumption (the mind works by performing discrete computations on discrete representations), the epistemological assumption (all activity can be formalized in predictive rules), and the ontological assumption (reality consists of independent, atomic facts). Drawing on the phenomenological and hermeneutical tradition, especially the work of Martin Heidegger, Dreyfus argued that human being is highly context-bound, making these context-free assumptions false. He argued that to get a device with human-like intelligence would require it to have a human-like being-in-the-world, bodies more or less like ours, and social acculturation more or less like ours. Contrary to a popular misconception, Dreyfus never predicted that computers would never beat humans at chess. In *Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence*, he only reported the state of the art: "Still no chess program can play even amateur chess." Daniel Crevier writes: "time has proven the accuracy and perceptiveness of some of Dreyfus's comments. Had he formulated them less aggressively, constructive actions they suggested might have been taken much earlier." The first edition of *What Computers Can't Do* followed in 1972, and this critique of AI (translated into at least ten languages) established Dreyfus's public reputation. When UC Berkeley and Apple began making lecture classes available as podcasts around 2006, a recording of Dreyfus teaching "Man, God, and Society in Western Literature – From Gods to God and Back" rose to the 58th most popular webcast on iTunes.

Did You Know?

• The *Futurama* character Professor Hubert Farnsworth is partly named after Dreyfus, writer Eric Kaplan having been a former student.
• Dreyfus's 1965 paper *Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence* was described as 'famously combative.'
• A recording of Dreyfus's UC Berkeley lecture course 'Man, God, and Society in Western Literature – From Gods to God and Back' rose to the 58th most popular webcast on iTunes.
• Dreyfus never predicted that computers would never beat humans at chess; he only reported that 'Still no chess program can play even amateur chess.'
• Dreyfus's critique of AI has been translated into at least ten languages.