Back in the 1970s, the researcher and mathematician Anatol Holt summed up this myopia by saying that AI was a technology that can make a perfect chess move while the room is on fire. How relevant that diagnosis still felt, even now. Modern AI behaved like a kind of game-playing savant, mastering isolated tasks that lent themselves to narrow metrics like “error rate,” while failing to notice the burning embers that were falling on the board.
