A cheap proxy instead of a hard answer
Faced with fundamental questions whose answers carry real consequences, human groups often reach for a cheap proxy rather than engage the hard thing in earnest. It is a fashionable old move.
In 1967, a research field settled, or rather behaved as if it had settled, a foundational dispute about nothing less than the nature of intelligence… by having a machine play and win a game of chess. In a way it reduced a whole domain to one of its instances and not even a representative one. It is worth being precise about what happened, because the move is still in use today as parties with vested interests scramble to provide tangible proofs backing their various claims.
Hubert Dreyfus, a philosopher known for his work on Heidegger published What Computers Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason with Harper & Row in 1972. In that book the author argues that human intelligence is fundamentally embodied, situated, and not reducible to symbolic computation in the way “good old-fashioned AI” assumed. That thesis was already present in a RAND report he had written a couple of years earlier, which was ridiculed by prominent AI figures (Newell, Simon, Minsky, Papert). In essence Dreyfus claimed that symbolic manipulation was not sufficient for intelligence, and that the field’s habit of mistaking narrow wins for steps toward general machine intelligence was a pattern, not progress. The pattern of mistaking greater achievement in one dimension as actual progress for the whole of a domain of enquiry.
The argument was fundamentally philosophical. It could not be settled by experiment decades ago, and arguably cannot be settled now. In those days, the field substituted the inconvenient question for another one that it would convert into an experiment. Thus the discipline tackled and settled something very different from the actual question posed by Herbert Dreyfus. MIT researchers sat him down across from Greenblatt’s MacHack program. He lost. An ACM newsletter reportedly summed it up with the line that told you precisely what had been adjudicated: a ten-year-old can beat the machine, but the machine can beat Dreyfus. Seymour Papert’s rebuttal was titled “Dreyfus Can’t Play Chess Either.”
Notice what had just occurred. A claim about whether intelligence reduces to symbol-shuffling was answered by demonstrating that a philosophy professor was mediocre at chess. Many in the AI community celebrated and treated the result as vindication. The question it had actually been asked remained exactly as open as before. And arguably perhaps even more, considering how it had been processed by prominent figures of computer science, who should have known better.
This is not a story about whether Dreyfus was right. The honest answer is partial: symbolic AI did collapse roughly where he said it would – strongly symbolic, rule‑based, expert systems ran into severe problems with brittleness, common‑sense knowledge, and scaling in the 1970s–1980s, a period that became known as an “AI winter” –; whether today’s systems answer his deeper point about embodiment or merely route around it is genuinely unresolved, and anyone selling you certainty on that is selling something. It is a story about adjudication, about how a community closes a question it has no legitimate procedure for closing.
The mechanism is worth naming, because it generalizes. The real question carried a brutal cost to answer: years, maybe decades of work whose outcome no one could see in advance. The chess match carried no such cost. Everyone could see who won in an afternoon. Faced with a question that was expensive to answer and a proxy that was cheap, the field optimized for the proxy and treated victory there as closure on the thing it stood in for. Measuring the wrong thing precisely is not a clerical error, but rather the instrument of settlement wielded by the intellectually dishonest brokers of those days, who have potent successors in our times.
What makes it effective is that the narrow win was fair. Dreyfus had overclaimed; he had said no program could beat a ten-year-old, and he was beaten. The rebuttal landed. The illegitimacy is not in the chess result, but in the silent promotion of “you were wrong about chess” into “the question is closed.” A legitimate narrow finding was laundered into a broad settlement no one had earned.
And the settlement served someone. The program under threat was not Dreyfus’s reputation; it was the field’s account of itself: its predictions, its funding, its sense that general intelligence was a few well-funded years away. A discipline that had just been told its core assumption might be wrong did not convene a process to test the charge. Instead it devised a mechanism compatible with its vested interests, that it presented as a valid proxy. A proxy it was almost certain to win. That was neither scientific, nor a proper, earnest and structured refutation. As often in human affairs, it reflected a tendency of human groups, industries, communities or governments to use power and authority without due diligence and process. It was borne out of the realization and fear that taking the time to answer the challenge would outrun the patience of the keepers of resources needed. It was also a form of greed and craving of those scarce resources needed to allow passionate and interested – in all senses of the word – individuals to continue their exploration, their research above and beyond any agreed or effective limits of resources. Hence it became expedient to implicitly agree on an improper proxy in order to pronounce settled a question that could not be answered easily. And this is precisely what we are seeing today with innovation conflated as progress, technology seen as a supernatural solution to practical constraints facing humanity and denial of scientific knowledge and facts when that denial is a convenient way of perpetuating practices that benefit those endorsing the groundless thesis of denial.
This is the older sibling of a problem worth circling back to: authority exercised without any legitimate process for exercising it with appropriate checks and balances. A capability gets embedded, a question gets closed, a dissenter gets removed – all without anyone specifying the rule by which such things are decided, or who would have standing to contest them. The chess match is the historical existence-proof. It shows the move is not a quirk of one bad week at MIT, but, rather sadly, that the move works.
Here is the uncomfortable part. The question is not whether those researchers behaved badly towards Dreyfus – who, in his words, became, for a significant period of time, someone no serious academic would have lunch with. It is this: when a hard question about capability lands on us now, that is expensive to answer, threatening to someone’s plans, what is the invalid proxy we reach for to avoid the hard work and effort required to actually address the question? And who pushed to have it settled through the proxy and call it closed or inexistent as fast as possible?