The Map Is Not the Territory: On the Limits of Confident Claims About Artificial Intelligence

This article examines the recurring pattern by which confident declarations of impossibility about emerging technology are later overturned. Drawing on documented cases — the sound barrier, the Dreyfus critique of artificial intelligence, Searle's Chinese Room, and the history of premature limits placed on flight and computation — it distinguishes between honest, falsifiable engineering claims (in the tradition of von Kármán) and authority claims that merely assert a boundary into existence. The article introduces the problem of the abstraction fallacy: mistaking a confident model of a system's limits for the system itself. It argues that the maps we draw of artificial intelligence's limits frequently fail to correspond to the territory, and that this gap carries governance consequences when precautionary frameworks are dismissed on the strength of confident but unfounded claims. Second article in the Zeus series on AI governance.