23 Things Computers Still Cannot Do

It is surprising that someone is even posting about things that computers cannot do. It speaks volumes about the advances in computing power humans have seen. This post is in response to a similar but reversed post by Seth Godin titled “23 things artificially intelligent computers can do better/faster/cheaper than you can” [link].

So here is my counter list of 23 things that computers (still) can’t do:

  1. truly understand the meaning of the word, “I”
  2. say “I love you” (corollary from above)
  3. achieve a fully parallel and distributed style of computing
  4. Use around 10^(-16) Joules per instruction per second
  5. Appreciate art
  6. feel
  7. have good manners
  8. understand motives of people – i.e. judge people/solve murder investigations
  9. negotiate with humans
  10. lead teams and people
  11. commit crimes of passion
  12. process and output emotions like courage, greed, envy, hated…
  13. making service personal (as opposed to just personalizing or customizing service)
  14. be curious
  15. innovate
  16. be creative (not the same as #3 above)
  17. deliver surprises
  18. be a yoga instructor/shrink/soccer coach
  19. be a politician
  20. evaluate exams requiring descriptive answers
  21. prove that every even integer greater than 2 can be expressed as a sum of 2 primes (aka Goldbach’s Conjecture & many other such curiosities)
  22. understand God, religion, dogma, theology
  23. write on this website as “i” do.



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