The earliest reference to the parable that I can find is in this paper from 1992. (Paywalled, so here’s the relevant page.) I also found another paper which attributes the story to this book, but the limited Google preview does not show me a specific discussion of it in the book.
In the “Building Neural Networks” book, the bottom of page 199 seems to be about “classifying military tanks in SAR imagery”. It goes on to say it is only interested in “tank” / “non-tank” categories.
The earliest reference to the parable that I can find is in this paper from 1992. (Paywalled, so here’s the relevant page.) I also found another paper which attributes the story to this book, but the limited Google preview does not show me a specific discussion of it in the book.
Here’s the full version of “What Artificial Experts Can and Cannot Do” (1992): http://www.jefftk.com/dreyfus92.pdf It has:
Expanded my comments into a post: http://www.jefftk.com/p/detecting-tanks
There’s also https://neil.fraser.name/writing/tank/ from 1998 which says the “story might be apocryphal”, so by that point it sounds like it had been passed around a lot.
In the “Building Neural Networks” book, the bottom of page 199 seems to be about “classifying military tanks in SAR imagery”. It goes on to say it is only interested in “tank” / “non-tank” categories.
But it also doesn’t look like it’s a version of this story. That section of the book is just a straight ahead “how to distinguish tanks” bit.
Great, thanks!