After a good look behind the curtain of Deep Learning, I've come to agree with Robin. No, Deep Learning will not fail. But it will fail to live up to its promi

After a good look behind the curtain of Deep Learning, I've come to agree with Robin. No, Deep Learning will not fail. But it will fail to live up to its promise to revolutionize AI, and it won't replace statistics or GOFAI in many tasks that require intelligence. Yes, DL has proven itself to perform (most?) gradient-based tasks better than any other algorithm. It maximizes the value in large data, minimizing error brilliantly. But ask it to address a single feature not present in the zillion images in ImageNet, and it's lost. (E.g. Where is the person in the image looking? To the left? The right? No DN using labels from ImageNet could say.) This is classic AI brittleness. With all the hoolpa surrounding DL's successes at single task challenges (mostly on images), we've failed to notice that nothing has really changed in AI. The info available from raw data remains as thin as ever. I think soon we'll all see that even ginormous quantities of thinly labeled supervised data can take your AI agent only so far -- a truly useful AI agent will need info that isn't present in all the labeled images on the planet. In the end the agent still needs a rich internal model of the world that it can further enrich with curated data (teaching) to master each new task or transfer the skill to a related domain. And to do that, it needs the ability to infer cause and effect, and explore possible worlds. Without that, any big-data-trained AI will always remain a one trick pony. Alas, Deep Learning (alone) can't fill that void. The relevant information and inferential capability needed to apply it to solve new problems and variations on them -- these skills just aren't present in the nets or the big data available to train them to high levels of broad competence. To create a mind capable of performing multiple diverse tasks, like the kinds a robot needs in order to repair a broken toaster, I think we'll all soon realize that DL has not replaced GOFAI at all. A truly useful intelligent agent still must learn hierarchies of concepts and use logic, if it's to do more than play board games.