Nevertheless, I maintain that you can’t, in all honesty, call the ML techniques we employ today “intelligence”. They are little more than function approximation

Nevertheless, I maintain that you can’t, in all honesty, call the ML techniques we employ today “intelligence”. They are little more than function approximation. Qualitatively this is a technique we had for decades, it’s just that now we can approximate functions that are far more complex. A qualitatively different thing that I’d have no problem calling “intelligence” would also supplement perceptual and transducer stuff we have now with higher level cognition and knowledge representation. But at the moment all of that is so far out of scope that the unit of bogosity is named after the last guy who tried to do something about those higher level issues (Doug Lenat) and everybody else is afraid to touch them with a 10 foot pole.