| This study shall be concerned with exploring fundamental limits of the artificial intelligence (AI) effort to simulate human cognition via machine artifacts. After fifty years of research in conjunction with enormous strides in the technological sphere, AI has failed to deliver on its promises to create synthetic entities capable of equaling, or even exceeding, human intelligence. In fact, even with today's super computers, AI researchers have been unable to reduplicate the cognitive achievements of a two year old child, not to mention a fully developed human intellect. Why is this the case? Is there some invisible ceiling which AI has been unwittingly up against?;I argue that there is indeed just such a fundamental limit having to do not only with the polyvalence of what constitutes human "reason," but also the dialectical nature of human communication which manifests through our pragmatic use of irony. My effort, therefore, shall be a return to an essentially Kantian metaphysical inquiry in order to account for AI's lack of critical clarity concerning the nature and limits of what amounts to its own unique and courageous gedanken experiment. In spite of Dreyfus's claim that there has been no adduction so far of an apriori critique against the possibility of a synthetic intelligence, I will attempt to do just such a dialectical assessment of the limits of AI from the transcendental point of view proffered by Kantian dialectic. Finally, I shall ground what might otherwise be a free-floating speculative exercise through referring to the praxis of our distributed cognition and communication, using the human ability to negotiate irony as that demonstration. |
