I am curious if we will someday build AI systems that are stratified with layers alternating between "statistical" like neural networks and "symbolic" like the

I am curious if we will someday build AI systems that are stratified with layers alternating between "statistical" like neural networks and "symbolic" like the older AI approaches. For example once your image recognition NN is tagging things, you could feed those tags into a more symbolic reasoning system. In theory Deep Learning should make this unnecessary (I guess?), but in practice these layers would be very useful. First they would make the system more interpretable. When your AI is a black box you don't learn anything. It would be nicer if we could gain heuristics or principles that we didn't know before, and apply them ourselves. Second with layers we wouldn't have to trust the AI so blindly. We could see if its thinking makes sense. In particular many AI applications can create feedback loops where it can perform well at first, but we'd like to keep monitoring it to ensure it stays that way. If neural networks resemble our unconscious then symbolic systems resemble our reason---like "Thinking Fast and Slow". Some people say we must be able to do "better" than NNs since babies don't need to see millions of dogs to recognize them. But the pixel-inputs of a NN do seem a lot like the rods & cones inputs of our vision, and one huge advantage of human perception is seeing in the flow of time. Our observations aren't millions of discrete snapshots, but millions of connected moments. I wonder how image recognition training would improve if we trained by showing short videos instead of still images. It seems that would make it a lot easier to recognize boundaries and possible variations. In humans, our unconscious is not something we can easily "see" and reflect on and correct, but our reason is reflective. We can articulate principles and opinions and judgments. We can re-use them and continually challenge them, question them, modify them, even reject them. There is a cynical idea that reason is nothing but post facto rationalization, and maybe it often is, but we needn't live that way. We can live an examined life if we choose. But I can't imagine a machine ever achieving that reflexivity without a symbolic system. And isn't that awareness close to what we mean by "consciousness"? Somewhere, I think in Jacques Maritain, I came across the definition of consciousness as simply awareness of the self, in particular that the self exists. Being able to recognize ideas as "mine" and reflect on them also seems like part of what consciousness is all about.