As long as people can put it in context. To a software person who's given AI some thought, the holes in Searle's argument are glaring. I had a very awkward co

As long as people can put it in context. To a software person who's given AI some thought, the holes in Searle's argument are glaring. I had a very awkward conversation in college with a philosophy student who had just been taught it and was taking it very seriously; I guess they have a lot of reverence for Great Thinkers who hand down Deep Insights, whereas to me this guy Searle sounded like an imbecile. Despite my initial horror at someone's taking the Chinese Room argument at face value, I realize it raises interesting questions about the chasm between AI's starting point (e.g. playing chess with S-expressions) and real human-like intelligence. I think we have more perspective on the problem these days for countless reasons -- work on understanding how subsystems in the brain work, being able to build or simulate neuron-like systems, applying powerful computers to a wide variety of problems. The big questions that remain are ones like whether a human brain can be simulated; how brain-like a machine would have to be to "understand" things -- self-aware? neural-network-like? embodied? -- and to what extent constructs like language reflect deep structure of the mind (i.e. human firmware we have to reverse engineer and duplicate) rather than universal logical constructs.