 Several philosophers had strong objections to the claims being made by AI researchers . One of the earliest was John Lucas , who argued that <unk> 's incompleteness theorem showed that a formal system ( such as a computer program ) could never see the truth of certain statements , while a human being could . Hubert Dreyfus ridiculed the broken promises of the 60s and critiqued the assumptions of AI , arguing that human reasoning actually involved very little " symbol processing " and a great deal of embodied , <unk> , unconscious " know how " . John Searle 's Chinese Room argument , presented in 1980 , attempted to show that a program could not be said to " understand " the symbols that it uses ( a quality called " <unk> " ) . If the symbols have no meaning for the machine , Searle argued , then the machine can not be described as " thinking " . 
