Human beings do not always behave according to formal rules. However, such an assumption ignores the fact that individual facts take on different meanings and levels of importance in different situations and contexts. A set of rules would have to be written to determine what value facts have in different contexts. Each context would have a near infinite number of variables that would have to be handled by the computer. Human beings don t always process their perceptions as individual bits of data, but rather as information connected to multiple layers of contexts.
Dreyfus arguments are very convincing.
He ignores some of the recent work in training computers to learn on their own so that they can deal with new and unexpected situations. However, new computer learning techniques do not change the fact that computers must reduce the information they receive to finite length bit-strings. Within restricted domains Dreyfus would agree that computers can be useful tools for human beings and even process some questions posed in natural language. But human intelligence is beyond the grasp of digital computers in his view. Most readers could understand the technical discussions in this book.