You cannot understand apples by analyzing the word "apple". Language is just the paper trail. There are plenty of examples: You can't understand a bank or money

You cannot understand apples by analyzing the word "apple". Language is just the paper trail. There are plenty of examples: You can't understand a bank or money by just analyzing bank statements. You can't understand food or supermarkets by analyzing their receipts. You can't understand the internet by analyzing TCP/IP. Regardless of the rich context a word may reside, or the infinite sample pool of text upon which we may unleash our learning robots, as long as they are all words, you will never encounter the real apple to which the symbol is linked, nor reach the reality to which all the symbols are linked. The machine will learn something. It just won't be anything like what we know or understand, or what generated the paper trail in the first place. They will be awkward simulations, which is exactly what we have. My now 20 month old son wasn't born literate, but already spoke. A grunt, a groan, a giggle, and a moan. These are his words. There is nuance, there is rhythm, there is intention, and there is tone. Not that I'm any good at writing baby books, but there is a reason babies enjoy rhyming and puns and silliness. The point is, words offer so much more than their meaning. This is the language they understand. They don't know English, and we aren't teaching them English. But they are slowly but surely articulating themselves, be it that they're hungry, lonely, or just want that grape. In fact, who is teaching who? Parents learn the language of their child first to be any good at parenting. Their expressions of their intelligence precludes the expressions of our own. Maybe all we need is a machine that groans. I find it no coincidence that the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein evolved with his experiences teaching children. And if I were to make a bold prediction, it appears the field of AI will benefit immensely from all the young and talented AI researches who start having kids of their own. The comments here already seem to attest to this. It's either that or giving up and deciding to teach preschoolers for a while. Either way, we'll soon have our book on AI that will do what Philosophical Investigations did for philosophy. And I can't wait.