Computers can only manipulate facts, whereas humans are the source of facts: a human being is not a fact or set of facts but a being who, using embodied capacities to satisfy embodied needs, creates both himself and the world of facts in the course of living; there is no reason to assume that a world organized in terms of such fundamental human capacities should be accessible by any other (e.g., digital) means.

By Hubert L. Dreyfus, from What Computers Can't Do

Key Arguments

  • After discussing Piaget, Dreyfus asserts a categorical difference: 'Computers can only deal with facts, but manthe source of factsis not a fact or set of facts, but a being who creates himself and the world of facts in the process of living in the world.'
  • He elaborates that 'This human world with its recognizable objects is organized by human beings using their embodied capacities to satisfy their embodied needs.'
  • From this he infers, 'There is no reason to suppose that a world organized in terms of these fundamental human capacities should be accessible by any other means.'
  • This argument ties together his themes of embodiment, needs, and world‑formation: since the structure of the human world is a product of embodied, need‑driven activity, not of neutral data, a mechanism that only operates on facts (as inputs/outputs) cannot in principle recover or replicate that world‑constituting activity.

Source Quotes

This should not surprise us. Computers can only deal with facts, but manthe source of factsis not a fact or set of facts, but a being who creates himself and the world of facts in the process of living in the world. This human world with its recognizable objects is organized by human beings using their embodied capacities to satisfy their embodied needs.
Computers can only deal with facts, but manthe source of factsis not a fact or set of facts, but a being who creates himself and the world of facts in the process of living in the world. This human world with its recognizable objects is organized by human beings using their embodied capacities to satisfy their embodied needs. There is no reason to suppose that a world organized in terms of these fundamental human capacities should be accessible by any other means.
This human world with its recognizable objects is organized by human beings using their embodied capacities to satisfy their embodied needs. There is no reason to suppose that a world organized in terms of these fundamental human capacities should be accessible by any other means. The Future of Artificial Intelligence But these difficulties give us no idea of the future of artificial intelligence.

Key Concepts

  • Computers can only deal with facts, but manthe source of factsis not a fact or set of facts, but a being who creates himself and the world of facts in the process of living in the world.
  • This human world with its recognizable objects is organized by human beings using their embodied capacities to satisfy their embodied needs.
  • There is no reason to suppose that a world organized in terms of these fundamental human capacities should be accessible by any other means.

Context

Conclusion of Dreyfus’s conceptual discussion in 'The Limits of Artificial Intelligence', where he summarizes the ontological gap between fact‑manipulating machines and world‑constituting human beings.