Hubert Lederer Dreyfus (1929–2017) was a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught from 1968 until his death.[1] Educated at Harvard, he became the leading American interpreter of Martin Heidegger and a central figure in carrying phenomenology and existentialism into English-speaking philosophy.[1]
He was also the most prominent philosophical critic of artificial intelligence. His 1972 book What Computers Can’t Do argued that human expertise is intuitive and situated in concrete experience, not the rule-following a computer reproduces, an argument the early AI community resisted and later partly vindicated.[1] With his older brother Stuart, an operations researcher, he built that view of expertise into the five-stage model of skill acquisition.[2]