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Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence (Hubert Dreyfus) - Paul Ferguson - 09-05-2026
""Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence" is the title of a 1965 paper written by philosopher Hubert Dreyfus and published by the RAND Corporation. In it, Dreyfus compared the early AI research programme to medieval alchemy: a discipline producing occasional impressive results through trial and error, while lacking a theory that explained why those results occurred. The comparison stung then, and it resurfaced in 2017 when researcher Ali Rahimi used his NeurIPS Test of Time award talk to argue that machine learning had become "alchemy" — a field where practitioners stack techniques that work without understanding the mechanism. In modern engineering usage, alchemy in artificial intelligence means development driven by empirical tinkering rather than by explanatory theory, reproducible method, and measurable cause and effect. Understanding that distinction is one of the most practical things an AI team can do, because alchemical projects are the ones that fail silently in production."
https://webpeak.org/blog/alchemy-artificial-intelligence