# The Limits of AI By:: [[Brian Heath]] 2023-01-09 Should you be worried about AI? That depends on your worldview, but perhaps you are asking the wrong question. AI is going to happen and keep happening. Technological progress is inevitable. The better question might be: what is AI really good at doing? It's good at computations and processing, but it must be trained via some model to do this - just like any of us. AI is not good at dealing with paradoxes or ontological universals as we cannot easily define them ourselves. Thus, AI is limited by our ability to logically represent an infinitely complex world that is always changing. If we cannot box in the universe into a computationally complete and logically consistent representation, what chance do we have in teaching AI to do it? We must think beyond what our physical and biochemical systems allow us to think and know, which may be impossible. All models are wrong, but some are useful. As such, all attempts at achieving human-level understanding within an AI program will also be wrong as it is just a model of what we think. In other words, if we can't even describe how our brain thrives in a world of paradoxes, how can we expect to program a computer to do it? It's simply beyond our capability. Some AI programs will be useful, just as all theories and models have some use. Understanding the limits of our knowledge will likely reduce your AI anxiety but also increase your existential anxiety as what do you really know, and what is the point? It's all too easy to bend our perception of reality. Take a pill and, after a few weeks, the world and your life doesn't seem as depressing. Did the world change, or did you? What other things skew how we think about the world? Now, how does this get programmed into an AI? What is real? We've not remotely answered any of these foundational questions in a logically consistent manner, so AI engineers are operating somewhere between parlor tricks and automating mundane tasks. #### Related Items [[Artificial Intelligence]] [[Knowledge]] [[Philosophy]] [[Ontology]] [[Existential]] [[All Models are Wrong]]