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In 1965, Hubert Dreyfus wrote the first widely-considered critique of artificial intelligence, Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence, a report for RAND. He updated and expanded the work for broad publication in 1972 as What Computers Can’t Do (which was further updated and revised for two subsequent reissues) and a “sequel,” Mind Over Machine (in 1986). For a precis of Dreyfus’ views on AI, see here.

His invocation of alchemy resonates still, for example in the estimable Henry Farrell‘s consideration of Adam Becker‘s (great) recent book More Everything Forever…

Adam Becker’s “More Everything Forever” begins by describing the ideas of Eliezer Yudkowsky, an AI guru who Sam Altman thinks deserves a Nobel Prize. Yudkowsky’s ambitions for humanity include “[p]erfect health, immortality,” and a future in which “[i]f you imagine something that’s worse than mansions with robotic servants for everyone, you are not being ambitious enough.” According to Yudkowsky and his peers, a “glorious transhumanist future” awaits us if we get AI right, although we face extinction if we get it wrong.

“AI” and “transhumanist” are new terms for rather older ambitions. As the seedy occultist Dr. Trelawney remarks in Anthony Powell’s 1962 novel, “The Kindly Ones,” “[t]o be forever rich, forever young, never to die … Such was in every age the dream of the alchemist.” Renaissance alchemists won the support of monarchs like Rudolf II, the Holy Roman Emperor who squandered his realm’s money on a futile quest to discover the Philosopher’s Stone. Now, as Becker explains, AGI, or artificial general intelligence, has become the means through which philosophers might transubstantiate our mundane reality into a realm in which the apparently impossible becomes possible: living forever, raising the dead, and remaking the universe in the shape of humanity.

These ideas would be a curiosity, if they weren’t reshaping the world, and policymakers’ understanding of national security…

[Farrell explains, elaborating on the beliefs in play and explaining how they played in the Biden Administration (which, he argues, largely internalized them) and now in Trump’s…]

… The Biden administration’s policies rested on risky bets. AI may not be the universal solvent for vexing and complex technological problems promised by Altman, Amodei, and their peers. Some (including most members of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, as well as myself and colleagues) believe that current approaches will not lead to anything like self-improving AGI anytime soon. As DeepSeek’s success in building AI models suggests, semiconductors may not provide the chokehold on AI that American policymakers believed.

In any event, the Trump administration has seemingly opted for a different approach, replacing a grand plan for a global AI order with a loose approach based on the ever-shifting convergence between notions of American greatness and the particular interests of well-connected companies. This currently involves leveraging control of technology to maintain American domination, cutting deals with Gulf states, while trying to cut China out. When Trump toured the Gulf states with an entourage of tech CEOs, he offered access to top-end semiconductors in exchange for promises of massive investment, graciously accepting a jet plane, and a large-scale money transfer routed, with fees, through his family stablecoin.

This emerging blend of imperium, magical technology, and self-dealing too is reminiscent of the Renaissance. The English wizard John Dee, who claimed to have turned mercury into gold in the presence of Rudolf II, is also credited with coining the term “British Empire.” As a member of the court of Queen Elizabeth I, he combined alchemical experiment and indirect conversation with angels with more mundane plans to extend British power across the Atlantic and enrich himself.

The alchemists’ quest for immortality and universal transformation is again entangled with the struggle among empires. The dreams of perfect health, the conquest of death, and mansions with robot servants that Becker describes inspire visions of a radically transformed far future and a near present in which America can use advanced technologies to bolster its power. Such visions stem from an ideology of salvation that has indeed fueled important technological advances but may be quite wrong about where those advances will bring us.

We are being ushered into a world where AI models offer new and useful means to summarize the information of the world and draw nonobvious connections across it, but can also weave new syncretic religious beliefs together from the myriad human sources that they summarize. In the early 20th century, Weber argued that rationalized Calvinism had led to the defeat of the old gods and the inexorable disenchantment of a world dominated by bureaucracy and organized capitalism. In the early 21st, just the opposite is happening as AI draws open the gate for the return of the fantastical. Yudkowsky’s eschatology is just one of the prophetic visions attendant on AI. The practical changes that AI will bring to bureaucracy and markets will go hand in hand with religious ecstasy and fervor, as some people come to believe that they can speak to God through the machine, while others use it to elaborate their own extended fantasies about politics. As Becker’s book shows, technology is not just an abstract force changing the world, but a mirror in which human beings see their dreams and ambitions made manifest. We’re starting to discover what that looks like at scale.

Eminently worth reading full: “What AI debates have to do with alchemy,” from @himself.bsky.social.

Then consider this, from Nicklas Lundblad, a senior exec at Deep Mind, Google, Stripe, and elsewhere, recently turned public policy Fellow. In a piece adapted from a lecture in a series of talks on the philosophy of artificial intelligence that he gave at Mid-Sweden University), he puts Dreyfus’s thought into context, tracing the history of arguments with/against it over the years, as both technology and thinking about technology advanced. He concludes…

… So, we may say, what is Dreyfus answer?… That he is obsessed with showing that machines are incapable of being human?

In fact, his conclusion, already in 1965 – and then repeated in the 1972 book – is much more interesting. Here is how Dreyfus concludes his critique:

If the alchemist had stopped poring over his retorts and pentagrams and had spent his time looking for the deeper structure of the problem, as primitive man took his eyes of the moon, came out of the trees, and discovered fire and the wheel, things would have been set moving in a more promising direction. After all, three hundred years after the alchemists we did get gold from lead (and we have landed on the moon), but only after we abandoned work on the alchemic level, and worked to understand the chemical level and the even deeper nuclear level instead.

Dreyfus’ answer is not to get stuck in the question of what computers can’t do – but to reject even that last piece of thick ontology and ask if we are making a fundamental conceptual mistake. He suggests that we find what is to intelligence as chemistry is to alchemy and look for another set of concepts, another language, to describe what we are doing.

We would, in Dreyfus view, be much better of trying to build alien intelligence or replicate animal intelligence or even jettisoning the idea of intelligence entirely in favour of a new concept – perhaps something like cognicity – that removes the Difference from the research program.

Dreyfus recommendations would imply that we should drop the benchmarks that distract us and instead focus on simpler, thinner ontologies around tasks and interactions. What we need, he would suggest, is a conceptual shift into that simpler ontology – at least if we want to make real progress.

The shift into modern machine learning seems to prove that when the thicker ontology was abandoned we did discovered things obscured by the idea of man as a symbolic animal.

What if we abandon both the idea of man and machine?…

Also worthy of a full review: “Reading Dreyfus,” from @nicklaslundblad.

* Zosimos of Panopolis, an alchemist (and Gnostic mystic)

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As we think about transmutation, we might recall that it was on this date in 1954 (only 11 years before Dreyfus wrote Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence) that IBM introduced the “IBM 608,” the first calculating machine to use only solid-state transistors instead of vacuum tubes (thus needing only about 5% of the power to perform the same operations). The machine was housed in several large cabinets and could be purchased for $83,210 (or rented for $1,760 per month)… that’s just over $1,000,000 on an inflation-adjusted basis (or about $22,000 per month). It used more than 3,000 germanium transistors and could store 40 nine-digit numbers and perform 4,500 additions per second, among other operations.

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