What can we expect from Artificial Intelligence?

By Thomas B. Fowler ( bio - articles - email ) | Jan 21, 2026

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Introductory note by Jeff Mirus:

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In 2024, Thomas Fowler wrote a series of four articles on artificial intelligence for CatholicCulture.org:

• AI, its capabilities and threats
• The AI paradigm of knowing and its problems
• The human paradigm of knowing, how it is different, why it is not replicable with AI
• Artificial Intelligence: Summary and Conclusions

In late 2025, Tom published a major book on this subject: Artificial Intelligence: Foundations, Limitations, Benefits and Dangers. This is a truly remarkable achievement—both scientifically and philosophically sound—involving a very confusing topic which is characterized for most of us by a combination of relentless commercial hype and absurdly frustrating chat bots. The book explains clearly how AI actually works, identifies its strengths and weaknesses, delineates the difference between human thought and artificial intelligence, and explains how AI can be helpful while identifying the kinds of things that AI will in fact never be able to do.

Fowler also reflects on the enormous costs of AI training and development, as well as the fundamental limitations of the technology in that the systems do not (and cannot) produce anything that actually approaches true human intelligence. To help readers realize the scope of Tom Fowler’s extraordinary book, here is the Table of Contents.

With the permission of the author, I am also presenting below a PDF version of one of the chapter’s of the book, “Chapter VII: AI’s Real Capabilities”, so that readers may begin to form a realistic appraisal of the benefits and limitations of AI technology:

Read: AI’s Real Capabilities (chapter 7 of Thomas B. Fowler’s remarkable book Artificial Intelligence)