Pete:

I like Judea Pearl and share his skepticism concerning the limits of AI. It is just super hard for me to get excited about the Ladder of Causation (introduced in 2018 in The Book of Why) when my most beloved mentor, Chris Argyris, taught me the Ladder of Inference which he introduced to the world in 1970. Am I pleased that a person from one discipline (computer science) entirely affirms the work of a brilliant person from another field (organizational learning) that I happen to like? Sure. But I don’t go ‘oh wow, that rocked my world.’ Argyris rocked my world when I started working with him in 1987.

If you are a fan of this field, I highly recommend to you the work of the late Nobel Laureate Gerald Edelman. You may well be entirely familiar with it — I won’t presume. But his Theory of Neuronal Group Selection (TNGS) also rocked my world and has made me a skeptic of the current vector of AI, which treats the brain as a computer rather than as the product of Darwinian learning/adaptation.

Net, I like Pearl and thinks he makes a big contribution and is correct (and with me) in his critique of statisticians. But for me personally on my intellectual journey (such as it is), he is in the camp of affirmational not inspirational.

All the best,

Roger