Prospect Magazine’s recent piece on the AI delusion is the best critique I have read of artificial intelligence. Ever. For a long time I’ve been thinking that the notion that “more AI” will somehow lead to digitized human intelligence is plain nonsense; Phillip Ball provides an excellent summation of the theoretical arguments which show exactly that. His article is part argument, part book review - it summarizes three recent book-length critiques of AI, and it does so concisely and well. The writing belies a good understanding of the nuts and bolts of AI, and it is easy to follow while piercing through a lot of preposterous hype. For all that, the article is not some great breakthrough of intellectual discovery: it merely states plainly what artificial intelligence is, and takes a reasonably good stab at what human intelligence is. What’s so surprising is that no one else seems to have captured these fairly self-evident truths so straightforwardly yet. The emperor has no clothes.