Are We Thinking Correctly About AI Intelligence? | PODCAST: The Joy of Why

Computer scientist Melanie Mitchell discusses why artificial intelligence doesn’t “think” or “reason” like humans, and how we can create better methods for measuring machine cognition. “The Joy of Why” is a Quanta Magazine podcast about curiosity and the pursuit of knowledge. The mathematician and author Steven Strogatz and the cosmologist and author Janna Levin take turns interviewing leading researchers about the great scientific and mathematical questions of our time. For more episodes visit Quanta Magazine: https://www.quantamagazine.org/tag/the-joy-of-why/ -------- 00:00 – Intro: AI in 2026 03:31 – What Surprised Mitchell Most 05:52 – AI as Alien Intelligence 09:03 – Erdős Problem & Transfer Learning 14:28 – Six Principles for AI Science 16:58 – Clever Hans & Spurious Cues 26:03 – Competence vs. Performance 29:56 – The Tyranny of Tasks 35:41 – Mechanistic Interpretability 44:23 – Meaning, Mastery & AI's Future -------- When an LLM answers a question, is it reasoning like humans, or just producing text that looks like reasoning? The distinction isn’t just philosophical, this determines what we can trust AI to do, how closely we need to supervise it, and ultimately what its real-world impact will turn out to be. Melanie Mitchell at the Santa Fe Institute argues that we lack adequate methods for measuring machine cognition, and that AI is a form of “alien intelligence” that operates through non-human cognitive mechanisms. In this episode of The Joy of Why, Mitchell tells Steven Strogatz how methods that psychologists use to study cognition in other kinds of “alien intelligence” — babies and animals — can be adapted to probe AI, and she lays out six principles for better assessing machine cognition. Their conversation ranges from the challenge of interpreting what’s happening inside these systems, to recent AI-assisted breakthroughs in mathematics, to why a math-performing horse from the early 1900s offers a cautionary tale for how we assess intelligence. --------- The Joy of Why is a podcast from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication supported by the Simons Foundation. Funding decisions by the Simons Foundation have no influence on the selection of topics, guests, or other editorial decisions in this podcast or in Quanta Magazine. The Joy of Why is produced by PRX Productions. The production team is Caitlin Faulds, Jade Abdul-Malik, Genevieve Sponsler, and Merritt Jacob. The executive producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales. Edwin Ochoa is our project manager. From Quanta Magazine, Simon Frantz and Samir Patel provided editorial guidance with support from Samuel Velasco, Simone Barr, and Michael Kanyongolo. Samir Patel is Quanta’s editor-in-chief. The episode art is by Chanelle Nibbelink and our logo is by Jaki King and Kristina Armitage. Special thanks to Garth Avery at the Cornell Broadcast Studio. --------- Quanta Magazine is an editorially independent publication supported by the Simons Foundation. We focus on developments in mathematics, theoretical physics, theoretical computer science and the basic life sciences. READ free math and science articles on the Quanta website: www.quantamagazine.org LEARN about the Simons Foundation: www.simonsfoundation.org FOLLOW our social channels: - Instagram: quantamag - Bluesky: @quantamagazine.bsky.social‬ - Facebook: quantanews - X: quantamagazine