Limitations on Accurate, Trusted, Human-level Reasoning

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Hauptverfasser: Panigrahy, Rina, Sharan, Vatsal
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Panigrahy, Rina
Sharan, Vatsal
author_facet Panigrahy, Rina
Sharan, Vatsal
contents We identify a fundamental incompatibility between the goals of accuracy, trust, and human-level reasoning in artificial intelligence (AI) systems, for strict mathematical definitions of these notions. We define accuracy of a system as the property that it never makes any false claims when it has the ability to abstain from making a prediction on any input, and trust as the assumption that the system is accurate. We define human-level reasoning as the property of an AI system always matching or exceeding human capability. Our core finding is that -- for our formal definitions of these notions -- an accurate and trusted AI system cannot be a human-level reasoning system: for such an accurate, trusted system there are task instances which are easily and provably solvable by a human but not by the system. Our proofs draw parallels to Gödel's incompleteness theorems and Turing's proof of the undecidability of the halting problem, and can be regarded as interpretations of Gödel's and Turing's results. Key to our proof is the formalization of the notion of trust, which allows us to separate the intrinsic property of a system (being accurate) from its epistemic status (being trusted).
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_21654
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Limitations on Accurate, Trusted, Human-level Reasoning
Panigrahy, Rina
Sharan, Vatsal
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computational Complexity
We identify a fundamental incompatibility between the goals of accuracy, trust, and human-level reasoning in artificial intelligence (AI) systems, for strict mathematical definitions of these notions. We define accuracy of a system as the property that it never makes any false claims when it has the ability to abstain from making a prediction on any input, and trust as the assumption that the system is accurate. We define human-level reasoning as the property of an AI system always matching or exceeding human capability. Our core finding is that -- for our formal definitions of these notions -- an accurate and trusted AI system cannot be a human-level reasoning system: for such an accurate, trusted system there are task instances which are easily and provably solvable by a human but not by the system. Our proofs draw parallels to Gödel's incompleteness theorems and Turing's proof of the undecidability of the halting problem, and can be regarded as interpretations of Gödel's and Turing's results. Key to our proof is the formalization of the notion of trust, which allows us to separate the intrinsic property of a system (being accurate) from its epistemic status (being trusted).
title Limitations on Accurate, Trusted, Human-level Reasoning
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computational Complexity
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21654