What Artificial Intelligence May Be Missing—And Why It Is Unlikely to Attain It Under Current Paradigms
Philosophies February 26, 2026 Pavel Straňák 2 citations
Contemporary artificial intelligence excels at data processing and text generation but appears to lack consciousness, autonomous motivation, and genuine understanding. This article uses the metaphor of a motorcycle and a horse to argue that technological progress may obscure deeper principles of life and mind. Drawing on abduction, tacit knowledge, phenomenal consciousness, and autopoiesis, the paper contends that current approaches to Artificial General Intelligence may overlook organizational principles only partially understood in biological systems. It calls for a new paradigm that asks not just how to build smarter machines, but what intelligence, life, and consciousness fundamentally are, acknowledging their relation to computability remains an open question.