I came to say roughly this but you’ve said it with more style. Who is to say that in 15 years we won’t make difference-of-kind advancements in, say, natural la

I came to say roughly this but you’ve said it with more style. Who is to say that in 15 years we won’t make difference-of-kind advancements in, say, natural language sythesis by virtue of a broad patchwork, piecewise sort of landscape made up of advancements in restaurant reservations, calendar items, customer service chatbots, etc. Each solution region would be driven by incremental research and profitability constraints, and it’s fine to point at any one solution region and say, well that probably won’t generalize to something “AI complete” in natural language. But as each bespoke arm of research gets more advanced, we could learn metaheuristics about selecting between them, or distilling common solution architectures. People, even an informed academic in this article, still seem to appeal to some vague idea that “real” human level skill at a generic sythetic task like natural language has some mystical greater theoretical structure to it. But time and again we see that the steady accumulation of a frankensteined patchwork of many approaches and many bespoke, situation-specific architectures can end up with uncanny, competitive results on tasks of import. I’m not saying there’s anything about current fashionable methods that gives any guarantees, and of course there is always overblown hype, especially in corners of industry that try to use that hype for credential signalling and rent-seeking opportunities. But it just seems short-sighted to come across as so certain that ugly patchworks of different siloed solutions could never be glued together or agglomerated to make difference-of-kind improvements. In fact, applied machine learning seems to a historical trail of exactly this type of patchwork. Are there going to be cases when a whole new theoretical paradigm is needed to reach some performance goal? Yes, of course. And any sensible current practitioner would admit as much. But this is a reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater?