Sagan Effect

Logology is the study of all things related to science and its practitioners— philosophical, biological, psychological, societal, historical, political, institutional, financial. The term "logology" is back-formed from the suffix "-logy", as in "geology", "anthropology", etc., in the sense of the "study of science"., , English-language summary: pp. 741–43 note 3
The word "logology" provides grammatical variants not available with the earlier terms "science of science" and "sociology of science", such as "logologist", "logologize", "logological", and "logologically". The emerging field of metascience is a subfield of logology.

Origins

The early 20th century brought calls, initially from sociologists, for the creation of a new, empirically based science that would study the scientific enterprise itself. The early proposals were put forward with some hesitancy and tentativeness. The new meta-science would be given a variety of names, including "science of knowledge", "science of science", " sociology of science", and "logology".

Florian Znaniecki, who is considered to be the founder of Polish academic sociology, and who in 1954 also served as the 44th president of the American Sociological Association, opened a 1923 article:

ough theoretical reflection on knowledge—which arose as early as Heraclitus and the Eleatics—stretches... unbroken... through the history of human thought to the present day... we are now witnessing the creation of a new ''science of knowledge'' uthor's emphasiswhose relation to the old inquiries may be compared with the relation of modern physics and chemistry to the 'natural philosophy' that preceded them, or of contemporary sociology to the 'political philosophy' of antiquity and the Renaissance. ere is beginning to take shape a concept of a single, general theory of knowledge... permitting of empirical study.... This theory... is coming to be distinguished clearly from epistemology, from normative logic, and from a strictly descriptive history of knowledge."

A dozen years later, Polish husband-and-wife sociologists Stanisław Ossowski and Maria Ossowska (the ''Ossowscy'') took up the same subject in an article on "The Science of Science" whose 1935 English-language version first introduced the term "science of science" to the world. The article postulated that the new discipline would subsume such earlier ones as epistemology, the philosophy of science, the psychology of science, and the sociology of science. The science of science would also concern itself with questions of a practical character such as social and state policy in relation to science, such as the organization of institutions of higher learning, of research institutes, and of scientific expeditions, and the protection of scientific workers, etc. It would concern itself as well with historical questions: the history of the conception of science, of the scientist, of the various disciplines, and of learning in general.

In their 1935 paper, the ''Ossowscy'' mentioned the German philosopher Werner Schingnitz (1899–1953) who, in fragmentary 1931 remarks, had enumerated some possible types of research in the science of science and had proposed his own name for the new discipline: scientiology. The ''Ossowscy'' took issue with the name:

Those who wish to replace the expression 'science of science' by a one-word term hatsound international, in the belief that only after receiving such a name illa given group of uestions beofficially dubbed an autonomous discipline, ightbe reminded of the name 'mathesiology', proposed long ago for similar purposes y the French mathematician and physicist André-Marie Ampère (1775–1836)">André-Marie_Ampère.html" ;"title="y the French mathematician and physicist André-Marie Ampère">y the French mathematician and physicist André-Marie Ampère (1775–1836)"

Yet, before long, in Poland, the unwieldy three-word term ''nauka o nauce'', or science of science, was replaced by the more versatile one-word term ''naukoznawstwo'', or logology, and its natural variants: ''naukoznawca'' or logologist, ''naukoznawczy'' or logological, and ''naukoznawczo'' or logologically. And just after World War II, only 11 years after the ''Ossowscy''s landmark 1935 paper, the year 1946 saw the founding of the Polish Academy of Sciences' quarterly ''Zagadnienia Naukoznawstwa'' (Logology) –— long before similar journals in many other countries.

The new discipline also took root elsewhere—in English-speaking countries, without the benefit of a one-word name.

Science

The term

The word science, from the Latin ''scientia'' meaning knowledge, signifies somewhat different things in different languages. In English, science when unqualified, generally refers to the exact, natural, or hard sciences. The corresponding terms in other languages, for example French, German, and Polish, refer to a broader domain that includes not only the exact sciences (logic and mathematics) and the natural sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, Earth sciences, geography, astronomy, etc.) but also the engineering sciences, social sciences (history, geography, psychology, physical anthropology, sociology, political science, economics, international relations, pedagogy, etc.), and humanities (philosophy, history, cultural anthropology, linguistics, etc.). Michael Shermer, "''Scientia Humanitatis''", ''Scientific American'', vol. 312, no. 6 (June 2015), p. 80.

University of Amsterdam humanities professor Rens Bod points out that science—defined as a set of methods that describes and interprets observed or inferred phenomena, past or present, aimed at testing hypotheses and building theories—applies to such humanities fields as philology, art history, musicology, linguistics, archaeology, historiography, and literary studies.

Bod gives a historic example of scientific textual analysis. In 1440 the Italian philologist Lorenzo Valla exposed the Latin document '' Donatio Constantini'', or The Donation of Constantine – which was used by the Catholic Church to legitimize its claim to lands in the Western Roman Empire – as a forgery. Valla used historical, linguistic, and philological evidence, including counterfactual reasoning, to rebut the document. Valla found words and constructions in the document that could not have been used by anyone in the time of Emperor Constantine I, at the beginning of the fourth century C.E. For example, the late Latin word ''feudum'', meaning fief, referred to the feudal system, which would not come into existence until the medieval era, in the seventh century C.E. Valla's methods were those of science, and inspired the later scientifically-minded work of Dutch humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466–1536), Leiden University professor Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540–1609), and philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632–77). Here it is not the experimental method dominant in the exact and natural sciences, but the comparative method central to the humanities, that reigns supreme.

Knowability

Science's search for the truth about various aspects of reality entails the question of the very ''knowability'' of reality. Philosopher Thomas Nagel writes: "n te pursuit of scientific knowledge through the interaction between theory and observation... we test theories against their observational consequences, but we also question or reinterpret our observations in light of theory. (The choice between geocentric and heliocentric theories at the time of the Copernican revolution is a vivid example.) ...
How things seem is the starting point for all knowledge, and its development through further correction, extension, and elaboration is inevitably the result of more seemings—considered judgments about the plausibility and consequences of different theoretical hypotheses. The only way to pursue the truth is to consider what seems true, after careful reflection of a kind appropriate to the subject matter, in light of all the relevant data, principles, and circumstances."

The question of knowability is approached from a different perspective by physicist-astronomer Marcelo Gleiser: "What we observe is not nature itself but nature as discerned through data we collect from machines. In consequence, the scientific worldview depends on the information we can acquire through our instruments. And given that our tools are limited, our view of the world is necessarily myopic. We can see only so far into the nature of things, and our ever shifting scientific worldview reflects this fundamental limitation on how we perceive reality." Gleiser cites the condition of biology before and after the invention of the microscope or gene sequencing; of astronomy before and after the telescope; of particle physics before and after colliders or fast electronics. " e theories we build and the worldviews we construct change as our tools of exploration transform. This trend is the trademark of science." Marcelo Gleiser, "How Much Can We Know? The reach of the scientific method is constrained by the limitations of our tools and the intrinsic impenetrability of some of nature's deepest questions", ''Scientific American'', vol. 318, no. 6 (June 2018), p. 73.

Writes Gleiser: "There is nothing defeatist in understanding the limitations of the scientific approach to knowledge.... What should change is a sense of scientific triumphalism—the belief that no question is beyond the reach of scientific discourse.

"There are clear unknowables in science—reasonable questions that, unless currently accepted laws of nature are violated, we cannot find answers to. One example is the multiverse: the conjecture that our universe is but one among a multitude of others, each potentially with a different set of laws of nature. Other universes lie outside our causal horizon, meaning that we cannot receive or send signals to them. Any evidence for their existence would be circumstantial: for example, scars in the radiation permeating space because of a past collision with a neighboring universe." Marcelo Gleiser, "How Much Can We Know?, ''Scientific American'', vol. 318, no. 6 (June 2018), p. 73.

Gleiser gives three further examples of unknowables, involving the origins of the universe; of life; and of mind:

"Scientific accounts of the origin of the universe are incomplete because they must rely on a conceptual framework to even begin to work: energy conservation, relativity, quantum physics, for instance. Why does the universe operate under these laws and not others?

"Similarly, unless we can prove that only one or very few biochemical pathways exist from nonlife to life, we cannot know for sure how life originated on Earth.

"For consciousness, the problem is the jump from the material to the subjective—for example, from firing neurons to the experience of pain or the color red. Perhaps some kind of rudimentary consciousness could emerge in a sufficiently complex machine. But how could we tell? How do we establish—as opposed to conjecture—that something is conscious?" Paradoxically, writes Gleiser, it is through our consciousness that we make sense of the world, even if imperfectly. "Can we fully understand something of which we are a part?"

Among all the sciences (i.e., disciplines of learning, writ large) there seems to exist an inverse relation between precision and intuitiveness. The most intuitive of the disciplines, aptly termed the "humanities", relate to common human experience and, even at their most exact, are thrown back on the comparative method; less intuitive and more precise than the humanities are the social sciences; while, at the base of the inverted pyramid of the disciplines, physics (concerned with mattergy – the matter and energy in the universe) is, at its deepest, the most precise discipline and at the same time utterly non-intuitive.

Facts and theories

Theoretical physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson explains that " ience consists of facts and theories":

"Facts are supposed to be true or false. They are discovered by observers or experimenters. A scientist who claims to have discovered a fact that turns out to be wrong is judged harshly....

"Theories have an entirely different status. They are free creations of the human mind, intended to describe our understanding of nature. Since our understanding is incomplete, theories are provisional. Theories are tools of understanding, and a tool does not need to be precisely true in order to be useful. Theories are supposed to be more-or-less true... A scientist who invents a theory that turns out to be wrong is judged leniently."

Dyson cites a psychologist's description of how theories are born: "We can't live in a state of perpetual doubt, so we make up the best story possible and we live as if the story were true." Dyson writes: "The inventor of a brilliant idea cannot tell whether it is right or wrong." The passionate pursuit of wrong theories is a normal part of the development of science. Freeman Dyson, "The Case for Blunders", ''The New York Review of Books'', vol. LXI, no. 4 (March 6, 2014), p. 4. Dyson cites, after Mario Livio, five famous scientists who made major contributions to the understanding of nature but also believed firmly in a theory that proved wrong.

Charles Darwin explained the evolution of life with his theory of natural selection of inherited variations, but he believed in a theory of blending inheritance that made the propagation of new variations impossible. He never read Gregor Mendel's studies that showed that the laws of inheritance would become simple when inheritance was considered as a random process. Though Darwin in 1866 did the same experiment that Mendel had, Darwin did not get comparable results because he failed to appreciate the statistical importance of using very large experimental samples. Eventually, Mendelian inheritance by random variation would, no thanks to Darwin, provide the raw material for Darwinian selection to work on.

William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) discovered basic laws of energy and heat, then used these laws to calculate an estimate of the age of the earth that was too short by a factor of fifty. He based his calculation on the belief that the earth's mantle was solid and could transfer heat from the interior to the surface only by conduction. It is now known that the mantle is partly fluid and transfers most of the heat by the far more efficient process of convection, which carries heat by a massive circulation of hot rock moving upward and cooler rock moving downward. Kelvin could see the eruptions of volcanoes bringing hot liquid from deep underground to the surface; but his skill in calculation blinded him to processes, such as volcanic eruptions, that could not be calculated.

Linus Pauling discovered the chemical structure of protein and proposed a completely wrong structure for DNA, which carries hereditary information from parent to offspring. Pauling guessed a wrong structure for DNA because he assumed that a pattern that worked for protein would also work for DNA. He overlooked the gross chemical differences between protein and DNA. Francis Crick and James Watson paid attention to the differences and found the correct structure for DNA that Pauling had missed a year earlier.

Astronomer Fred Hoyle discovered the process by which the heavier elements essential to life are created by nuclear reactions in the cores of massive stars. He then proposed a theory of the history of the universe known as steady-state cosmology, which has the universe existing forever without an initial Big Bang (as Hoyle derisively dubbed it). He held his belief in the steady state long after observations proved that the Big Bang had happened.

Albert Einstein discovered the theory of space, time, and gravitation known as general relativity, and then added a cosmological constant, later known as dark energy. Subsequently, Einstein withdrew his proposal of dark energy, believing it unnecessary. Long after his death, observations suggested that dark energy really exists, so that Einstein's addition to the theory may have been right; and his withdrawal, wrong.

To Mario Livio's five examples of scientists who blundered, Dyson adds a sixth: himself. Dyson had concluded, on theoretical principles, that what was to become known as the W-particle, a charged weak boson, could not exist. An experiment conducted at CERN, in Geneva, later proved him wrong. "With hindsight I could see several reasons why my stability argument would not apply to W-particles. heyare too massive and too short-lived to be a constituent of anything that resembles ordinary matter."

Truth

Harvard University historian of science Naomi Oreskes points out that the truth of scientific findings can never be assumed to be finally, absolutely settled.Naomi Oreskes, "Is Science Actually 'Right'?: It doesn't deliver absolute truth, but it contains useful elements of truth", ''Scientific American'', vol. 325, no. 1 (July 2021), p. 78. The history of science offers many examples of matters that scientists once thought to be settled and which have proven not to be, such as the concepts of Earth being the center of the universe, the absolute nature of time and space, the stability of continents, and the cause of infectious disease.

Science, writes Oreskes, is not a fixed, immutable set of discoveries but "a ''process'' of learning and discovery .. Science can also be understood as an institution (or better, a set of institutions) that facilitates this work.

It is often asserted that scientific findings are true because scientists use "the scientific method". But, writes Oreskes, "we can never actually agree on what that method is. Some will say it is empiricism: observation and description of the world. Others will say it is the experimental method: the use of experience and experiment to test hypotheses. (This is cast sometimes as the hypothetico-deductive method, in which the experiment must be framed as a deduction from theory, and sometimes as falsification, where the point of observation and experiment is to refute theories, not to confirm them.) Recently a prominent scientist claimed the scientific method was to avoid fooling oneself into thinking something is true that is not, and vice versa."

In fact, writes Oreskes, the methods of science have varied between disciplines and across time. "Many scientific practices, particularly statistical tests of significance, have been developed with the idea of avoiding wishful thinking and self-deception, but that hardly constitutes 'the scientific method.'"

Science, writes Oreskes, "is ''not'' simple, and neither is the natural world; therein lies the challenge of science communication. ..Our efforts to understand and characterize the natural world are just that: efforts. Because we're human, we often fall flat."

"Scientific theories", according to Oreskes, "are not perfect replicas of reality, but we have good reason to believe that they capture significant elements of it."

Empiricism

Steven Weinberg, 1979 Nobel laureate in physics, and a historian of science, writes that the core goal of science has always been the same: "to explain the world"; and in reviewing earlier periods of scientific thought, he concludes that only since Isaac Newton has that goal been pursued more or less correctly. He decries the "intellectual snobbery" that Plato and Aristotle showed in their disdain for science's practical applications, and he holds Francis Bacon and René Descartes to have been the "most overrated" among the forerunners of modern science (they tried to prescribe rules for conducting science, which "never works").

Weinberg draws parallels between past and present science, as when a scientific theory is "fine-tuned" (adjusted) to make certain quantities equal, without any understanding of why they ''should'' be equal. Such adjusting vitiated the celestial models of Plato's followers, in which different spheres carrying the planets and stars were assumed, with no good reason, to rotate in exact unison. But, Weinberg writes, a similar fine-tuning also besets current efforts to understand the "dark energy" that is speeding up the expansion of the universe. Jim Holt, "At the Core of Science" (a review of Steven Weinberg, ''To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science'', Harper, 2015), ''The New York Review of Books'', vol. LXII, no. 14 (September 24, 2015), p. 53.

Ancient science has been described as having gotten off to a good start, then faltered. The doctrine of atomism, propounded by the pre-Socratic philosophers Leucippus and Democritus, was naturalistic, accounting for the workings of the world by impersonal processes, not by divine volitions. Nevertheless, these pre-Socratics come up short for Weinberg as proto-scientists, in that they apparently never tried to justify their speculations or to test them against evidence.

Weinberg believes that science faltered early on due to Plato's suggestion that scientific truth could be attained by reason alone, disregarding empirical observation, and due to Aristotle's attempt to explain nature teleologically—in terms of ends and purposes. Plato's ideal of attaining knowledge of the world by unaided intellect was "a false goal inspired by mathematics"—one that for centuries "stood in the way of progress that could be based only on careful analysis of careful observation." And it "never was fruitful" to ask, as Aristotle did, "what is the purpose of this or that physical phenomenon."

A scientific field in which the Greek and Hellenistic world did make progress was astronomy. This was partly for practical reasons: the sky had long served as compass, clock, and calendar. Also, the regularity of the movements of heavenly bodies made them simpler to describe than earthly phenomena. But not ''too'' simple: though the sun, moon and "fixed stars" seemed regular in their celestial circuits, the "wandering stars"—the planets—were puzzling; they seemed to move at variable speeds, and even to reverse direction. Writes Weinberg: "Much of the story of the emergence of modern science deals with the effort, extending over two millennia, to explain the peculiar motions of the planets."

The challenge was to make sense of the apparently irregular wanderings of the planets on the assumption that all heavenly motion is actually circular and uniform in speed. Circular, because Plato held the circle to be the most perfect and symmetrical form; and therefore circular motion, at uniform speed, was most fitting for celestial bodies. Aristotle agreed with Plato. In Aristotle's cosmos, everything had a "natural" tendency to motion that fulfilled its inner potential. For the cosmos' sublunary part (the region below the moon), the natural tendency was to move in a straight line: downward, for earthen things (such as rocks) and water; upward, for air and fiery things (such as sparks). But in the celestial realm things were not composed of earth, water, air, or fire, but of a "fifth element", or "quintessence," which was perfect and eternal. And its natural motion was uniformly circular. The stars, the sun, the moon, and the planets were carried in their orbits by a complicated arrangement of crystalline spheres, all centered around an immobile earth. Jim Holt, "At the Core of Science" (a review of Steven Weinberg, ''To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science'', Harper, 2015), ''The New York Review of Books'', vol. LXII, no. 14 (September 24, 2015), p. 54.

The Platonic-Aristotelian conviction that celestial motions must be circular persisted stubbornly. It was fundamental to the astronomer Ptolemy's system, which improved on Aristotle's in conforming to the astronomical data by allowing the planets to move in combinations of circles called " epicycles".

It even survived the Copernican revolution. Copernicus was conservative in his Platonic reverence for the circle as the heavenly pattern. According to Weinberg, Copernicus was motivated to dethrone the earth in favor of the sun as the immobile center of the cosmos largely by aesthetic considerations: he objected to the fact that Ptolemy, though faithful to Plato's requirement that heavenly motion be circular, had departed from Plato's other requirement that it be of uniform speed. By putting the sun at the center—actually, somewhat off-center—Copernicus sought to honor circularity while restoring uniformity. But to make his system fit the observations as well as Ptolemy's system, Copernicus had to introduce still more epicycles. That was a mistake that, writes Weinberg, illustrates a recurrent theme in the history of science: "A simple and beautiful theory that agrees pretty well with observation is often closer to the truth than a complicated ugly theory that agrees better with observation."

The planets, however, do not move in perfect circles but in ellipses. It was Johannes Kepler, about a century after Copernicus, who reluctantly (for he too had Platonic affinities) realized this. Thanks to his examination of the meticulous observations compiled by astronomer Tycho Brahe, Kepler "was the first to understand the nature of the departures from uniform circular motion that had puzzled astronomers since the time of Plato."

The replacement of circles by supposedly ugly ellipses overthrew Plato's notion of perfection as the celestial explanatory principle. It also destroyed Aristotle's model of the planets carried in their orbits by crystalline spheres; writes Weinberg, "there is no solid body whose rotation can produce an ellipse." Even if a planet were attached to an ellipsoid crystal, that crystal's rotation would still trace a circle. And if the planets were pursuing their elliptical motion through empty space, then what was holding them in their orbits?

Science had reached the threshold of explaining the world not geometrically, according to shape, but dynamically, according to force. It was Isaac Newton who finally crossed that threshold. He was the first to formulate, in his " laws of motion", the concept of force. He demonstrated that Kepler's ellipses were the very orbits the planets would take if they were attracted toward the sun by a force that decreased as the square of the planet's distance from the sun. And by comparing the moon's motion in its orbit around the earth to the motion of, perhaps, an apple as it falls to the ground, Newton deduced that the forces governing them were quantitatively the same. "This," writes Weinberg, "was the climactic step in the unification of the celestial and terrestrial in science."

By formulating a unified explanation of the behavior of planets, comets, moons, tides, and apples, writes Weinberg, Newton "provided an irresistible model for what a physical theory should be"—a model that fit no preexisting metaphysical criterion. In contrast to Aristotle, who claimed to explain the falling of a rock by appeal to its inner striving, Newton was unconcerned with finding a deeper cause for gravity. He declared in a postscript to the second, 1713 edition of his ''Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica'': "I have not as yet been able to deduce from phenomena the reason for these properties of gravity, and I do not feign hypotheses. It is enough that gravity really exists and acts according to the laws that we have set forth." What mattered were his mathematically stated principles describing this force, and their ability to account for a vast range of phenomena.

About two centuries later, in 1915, a deeper explanation for Newton's law of gravitation was found in Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity: gravity could be explained as a manifestation of the curvature in spacetime resulting from the presence of matter and energy. Successful theories like Newton's, writes Weinberg, may work for reasons that their creators do not understand—reasons that deeper theories will later reveal. Scientific progress is not a matter of building theories on a foundation of reason, but of unifying a greater range of phenomena under simpler and more general principles.

Artificial intelligence

The term "artificial intelligence" (AI) was coined in 1955 by John McCarthy when he and other computer scientists were planning a workshop and did not want to invite Norbert Wiener, the brilliant, pugnacious, and increasingly philosophical (rather than practical) author on feedback mechanisms who had coined the term "cybernetics". The new term ''artificial intelligence'', writes Kenneth Cukier, "set in motion decades of semantic squabbles ('Can machines think?') and fueled anxieties over malicious robots... If McCarthy... had chosen a blander phrase—say, 'automation studies'—the concept might not have appealed as much to Hollywood ovieproducers and ojournalists..."

As machines have become increasingly capable, specific tasks considered to require "intelligence", such as optical character recognition, have often been removed from the definition of AI, a phenomenon known as the " AI effect". It has been quipped that "AI is whatever hasn't been done yet."

Since 1950, when Alan Turing proposed what has come to be called the "Turing test," there has been speculation whether machines such as computers can possess intelligence; and, if so, whether intelligent machines could become a threat to human intellectual and scientific ascendancy—or even an existential threat to humanity. John Searle points out common confusion about the correct interpretation of computation and information technology. "For example, one routinely reads that in exactly the same sense in which Garry Kasparov… beat Anatoly Karpov in chess, the computer called Deep Blue played and beat Kasparov.... is claim is bviouslysuspect. In order for Kasparov to play and win, he has to be conscious that he is playing chess, and conscious of a thousand other things... Deep Blue is conscious of none of these things because it is not conscious of anything at all. Why is consciousness so important? You cannot literally play chess or do much of anything else cognitive if you are totally disassociated from consciousness."John R. Searle, "What Your Computer Can't Know", ''The New York Review of Books'', 9 October 2014, p. 52.

Searle explains that, "in the literal, real, observer-independent sense in which humans compute, mechanical computers do not compute. They go through a set of transitions in electronic states that we can interpret computationally. The transitions in those electronic states are absolute or observer-independent, but ''the computation is observer-relative''. The transitions in physical states are just electrical sequences unless some conscious agent can give them a computational interpretation.... There is no psychological reality at all to what is happening in the omputer"

" digital computer", writes Searle, "is a syntactical machine. It manipulates symbols and does nothing else. For this reason, the project of creating human intelligence by designing a computer program that will pass the Turing Test... is doomed from the start. The appropriately programmed computer has a syntax ules for constructing or transforming the symbols and words of a languagebut no semantics omprehension of meaning... Minds, on the other hand, have mental or semantic content."John R. Searle, "What Your Computer Can't Know", ''The New York Review of Books'', 9 October 2014, p. 54.

Like Searle, Christof Koch, chief scientist and president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, in Seattle, is doubtful about the possibility of "intelligent" machines attaining consciousness, because " en the most sophisticated brain simulations are unlikely to produce conscious feelings." According to Koch, "Whether machines can become sentient s importantfor ethical reasons. If computers experience life through their own senses, they cease to be purely a means to an end determined by their usefulness to... humans. Per GNW Global Neuronal Workspace theory">Global Workspace Theory#Global neuronal workspace">Global Neuronal Workspace theory they turn from mere objects into subjects... with a point of view.... Once computers' cognitive abilities rival those of humanity, their impulse to push for legal and political rights will become irresistible – the right not to be deleted, not to have their memories wiped clean, not to suffer pain and degradation. The alternative, embodied by IIT ntegrated Information Theory is that computers will remain only supersophisticated machinery, ghostlike empty shells, devoid of what we value most: the feeling of life itself."

Professor of psychology and neural science Gary Marcus points out a so far insuperable stumbling block to artificial intelligence: an incapacity for reliable disambiguation. " rtually every sentence hat people generateis ambiguous, often in multiple ways. Our brain is so good at comprehending language that we do not usually notice." A prominent example is known as the "pronoun disambiguation problem" ("PDP"): a machine has no way of determining to whom or what a pronoun in a sentence—such as "he", "she" or "it"—refers.

Computer scientist Pedro Domingos writes: "AIs are like autistic savants and will remain so for the foreseeable future.... AIs lack common sense and can easily make errors that a human never would... They are also liable to take our instructions too literally, giving us precisely what we asked for instead of what we actually wanted.

Kai-Fu Lee, a Beijing-based venture capitalist, artificial-intelligence (AI) expert with a Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University, and author of the 2018 book, ''AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order'', emphasized in a 2018 PBS '' Amanpour'' interview with Hari Sreenivasan