Hubert Dreyfus is the preeminent expert on Heidegger so much so that in fact the various copies of Being and Time in his office are held together with rubber bands. In 1965 he took on the entire computer science department of MIT and in so doing explained the key differences between humans and computers.
The Moment of Clarity: Using the Human Sciences to Solve Your Toughest Business Problems, explains the problem:
Dreyfus claimed that symbolic representational artificial intelligence would never succeed because the algorithmic design— so skilled at following rule sets—had no ability to infer or intuit. To use anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s phrase, artificial intelligence was forever in the realm of thin description , completely incapable of understanding the “thick description” of our humanity. Today, such a claim seems commonplace, but at the time, Dreyfus was considered a maverick. He had never programmed a computer in his life, but his training in phenomenology and his deep knowledge of philosophy convinced him that our greatest asset as humans had nothing to do with our ability to follow rules. Humans are human because they have a perspective: they care about things. One might call it our ability to give a damn. And it is this quality that allows us to determine what matters and where we stand. A computer can’t do that.
The ability to distinguish between what is relevant and what is not is the key; this is perspective.
“What is relevant right now is that I am sitting here talking to you in this room,” Dreyfus told us. “What is not relevant is that the room may have ten billion specks of dust on the floor and two screws in the left corner and tiles that weigh a half pound each.”
The ability to have a perspective—to respond to what matters and what is meaningful— is at the heart of humanity and, by extension, at the heart of all successful businesses. A perspective implies that you have prioritized certain things— relevant things—and by consequence let some things go. This risk—letting profitable opportunities go for the sake of others— is the essence of all value propositions. We can’t solve all the problems for all the consumers all the time. Nor can we design products that meet all the needs of all the people everywhere. What we can do is risk responding to what calls us. We can find ourselves committed to a perspective. We can build a successful business that will sustain us.
Dreyfus summed it up by saying, “What distinguishes the risks I’m interested in from mere bravado is that they are taken in the interest of what one is committed to, what they have defined themselves in terms of, and what makes meaningful differences in their lives. This is the kind of risk that is a necessary step in becoming a master at anything.”
