The AI We Have vs. The AI We Need

Why Does AI Still Feel So Brittle? The Limits of Today's Computers.

09 June 2025

Have you ever felt a flash of frustration with a "smart" device? Your music service recommends the same five artists endlessly. Your smart assistant answers a slightly unusual question with a completely nonsensical reply. For all their power, why do even the most advanced AI systems sometimes feel so rigid and fragile?

The answer lies in a single, powerful concept that governs nearly every computer on the planet: determinism.

At their core, computers are deterministic machines. Given the same input, they will always produce the same output. This is their superpower—it's why your calculator is always right and your banking app is reliable. But this strength is also a fundamental limitation.

A deterministic system is like a master chef who can only cook from a fixed set of recipes. They can execute those recipes flawlessly, a thousand times over. But give them a new, unexpected ingredient, and the entire system breaks down. They can't invent a new dish on the fly.

This is the hidden ceiling for most of today's AI. These systems are incredibly sophisticated at following the complex "recipes" we give them—whether those recipes are hand-coded rules or patterns learned from vast datasets. They can analyze, predict, and generate within the boundaries of their programming.

But they can't truly adapt.

They can't fundamentally change their own rules when the world changes in a way they weren't trained for. This is why they feel brittle. They work perfectly until they don't.

To build a truly adaptive intelligence—one that can grow, evolve, and handle the beautiful messiness of reality—we need to move beyond this rigid paradigm. We need systems that don't just follow recipes but can write new ones.

But how do we do that? What if we could build a system where the "rules" themselves were as flexible as the "data"?

In our next post, we'll explore a radical idea that aims to tear down this wall.


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