The Promise of Artificial Intelligence: Reckoning and Judgment

A philosopher-computer scientist with fifty years in the field argues that the difference between calculation and judgment is categorical, not a matter of degree. Smith distinguishes between reckoning — the formal manipulation of representations that computers excel at — and genuine judgment, which requires registration with the world, commitment, and the kind of embodied understanding that current AI systems lack. The book is subtle and important: it does not deny AI's power but insists on precision about what that power is and is not. For product leaders deploying AI, Smith provides the conceptual vocabulary to think clearly about where machine capability ends and human judgment begins.