Gary Marcus’s Kluge and the benchmark of perfection (opens in new tab)

As Gary Marcus so often appears in debates about the future of artificial intelligence, I decided to grab his 2008 book Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind from my overgrown reading pile. I’m glad I did, though not because it taught me much about the human mind. It helped me understand Marcus’s critique of generative AI. Marcus’s argument is that the human mind is a ‘kluge’, a clumsy or inelegant yet surprisingly effective solution to a problem. Like our backward-installed ret...