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CFA Society New York Book Club: The Myth of Artificial Intelligence by Erik Larson

Wednesday, March 25 | 6:00 PM - 7:00 PM

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Overview

The CFA Society New York Book Club® meets every other month and is designed to be an informal group discussion on a multitude of investment related topics. The author is not present as this is simply a discussion on the book of the month to help members further digest the material and meet other like-minded CFA Society NY members. We will generally have 2-3 books planned in advance so members can pick and choose which ones they are interested in reading prior to the meeting. Overall, a way to build on our investment knowledge and meet other members.

Title: The Myth of Artificial Intelligence

Author: Erik Larson


Futurists insist that AI will soon eclipse the capacities of the most gifted human mind. What hope do we have against superintelligent machines? But we aren’t really on the path to developing intelligent machines. In fact, we don’t even know where that path might be.

Erik Larson takes us on a tour of the landscape of AI to show how far we are from superintelligence and what it would take to get there. Ever since Alan Turing, AI enthusiasts have equated artificial intelligence with human intelligence. This is a profound mistake. AI works on inductive reasoning, crunching data sets to predict outcomes. But humans don’t correlate data sets: We make conjectures informed by context and experience. Human intelligence is a web of best guesses, given what we know about the world. We haven’t a clue how to program this kind of intuitive reasoning, known as abduction. Yet it is the heart of common sense. That’s why Alexa can’t understand what you are asking and why AI can only take us so far.

Larson argues that AI hype is both bad science and bad for science. A culture of invention thrives on exploring unknowns, not overselling existing methods. Inductive AI will continue to improve at narrow tasks, but if we want to make real progress, we will need to start by more fully appreciating the only true intelligence we know – our own.