Isn’t the kind of programming that most of us do every single day just symbol manipulation of the kind he describes? On this site, I click reply, the web serve

Isn’t the kind of programming that most of us do every single day just symbol manipulation of the kind he describes? On this site, I click reply, the web server interprets my intention and presents me with a text box, etc. There’s a level of intelligence in pretty much any computer program. I think we take it for granted now because it’s so engrained in our data to day lives, but it’s remarkable isn’t it? Just look at how many decisions take place entirely within the ‘minds’ of computers when you try and buy a product on amazon and have it shipped to you. Everything from the pricing of the goods, to approving your credit worthiness to the logistics of getting it to your house is decided on by computers. All of that would have to have been done by human beings not very long ago. If anything, symbol manipulation has become such a dominant paradigm for artificial intelligence that we don’t actually recognize any of those activities as requiring intelligence any more — which is always the case every time we mechanize thought. The question is really whether either of those paradigms gets us to a “general” ai (whatever that is), or both, or neither.