Erik J. Larson – författare

“Exposes the vast gap between the actual science underlying AI and the dramatic claims being made for it.” —John Horgan“If you want to know about AI, read this book…It shows how a supposedly futuristic reverence for Artificial Intelligence retards progress when it denigrates our most irreplaceable resource for any future progress: our own human intelligence.” —Peter ThielEver since Alan Turing, AI enthusiasts have equated artificial intelligence with human intelligence. A computer scientist working at the forefront of natural language processing, Erik Larson takes us on a tour of the landscape of AI to reveal why 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. And we haven’t a clue how to program that kind of intuitive reasoning, which lies at the heart of common sense. Futurists insist AI will soon eclipse the capacities of the most gifted mind, but Larson shows how far we are from superintelligence—and what it would take to get there.“Larson worries that we’re making two mistakes at once, defining human intelligence down while overestimating what AI is likely to achieve…Another concern is learned passivity: our tendency to assume that AI will solve problems and our failure, as a result, to cultivate human ingenuity.”—David A. Shaywitz, Wall Street Journal“A convincing case that artificial general intelligence—machine-based intelligence that matches our own—is beyond the capacity of algorithmic machine learning because there is a mismatch between how humans and machines know what they know.”—Sue Halpern, New York Review of Books

A clear-eyed look at what AI actually is—and why we must focus on AI systems that augment human cognition, rather than mimic it. From a seasoned AI researcher and a VC investor and entrepreneur.Augmented Human Intelligence cuts through all the hype and noise around AI by returning to a central, often overlooked question: What is intelligence actually for? Rather than aiming to build autonomous superintelligent agents, AI leaders Erik Larson and Chee-We Ng argue in this book that we should focus on systems that support and extend human judgment, understanding, and decision-making—capacities that the current AI largely ignores.Most state-of-the-art models rely on statistical induction at scale. They generate text, recognize patterns, and predict outcomes with remarkable speed—but without any grasp of meaning, consequence, or purpose. The authors of this book contend this is not merely a technical limitation, but a conceptual one: intelligence is not pattern-matching alone. It emerges from interaction with the world, guided by goals, feedback, and relevance.This book aims to clarify the confusion around what AI is and isn’t, across everything from self-driving cars to robotics to conversational systems. In doing so, the authors hope to spur a shift in perspective—toward AI systems that augment human cognitive strengths rather than mimic human beings.What makes this book unique is its insistence that judgment and understanding aren’t optional extras—they’re central to the very idea of intelligence. By reframing what we mean by thinking, the authors invite readers to imagine a different future for AI: one grounded not in simulation or spectacle, but in support for real human insight.

Si quieres saber qué es la Inteligencia Artificial, lee este libro ― Peter Thiel, fundador de PayPal.Los mesías del futuro insisten en afirmar que la Inteligencia Artificial pronto eclipsará las capacidades de las mentes humanas con más talento. Según ellos, no queda ninguna esperanza, pues el avance de las máquinas superinteligentes es imparable. Pero la realidad es que ni estamos en el camino hacia el desarrollo de máquinas inteligentes ni sabemos siquiera dónde podría hallarse ese camino.Erik Larson es un científico e investigador pionero en el procesamiento del lenguaje natural, además de empresario tecnológico que trabaja a la vanguardia de la IA. En este libro nos acompaña en un recorrido por el panorama actual de este ámbito para demostrar lo lejos que estamos realmente de la superinteligencia y qué sería necesario para llegar a ella. Desde Alan Turing, los entusiastas de la inteligencia artificial han caído en el profundo error de equipararla con la inteligencia humana. Pero la IA trabaja con el razonamiento inductivo, procesando conjuntos de datos para predecir resultados, mientras que los humanos no correlacionamos conjuntos de datos: hacemos conjeturas a partir de la información del contexto y de la experiencia. No tenemos ni idea de cómo programar este tipo de razonamiento basado en la intuición, conocido como razonamiento abductivo. El verdadero problema es que la exageración alrededor de la IA no solo es mala ciencia, sino que también es mala para la ciencia. La cultura de la innovación florece cuando explora lo desconocido, no cuando exagera las virtudes de las tecnologías existentes.La IA inductiva seguirá mejorando en la realización de tareas específicas, pero si queremos lograr un progreso real, debemos comenzar por apreciar plenamente la única inteligencia verdadera que conocemos: la nuestra.