The nice thing about philosophical views is that they don't really matter. Whatever gets the ball rolling in beating the SotA we'll accept it. In science we sh

The nice thing about philosophical views is that they don't really matter. Whatever gets the ball rolling in beating the SotA we'll accept it. In science we shouldn't have to abide by philosophical views. They only hurt. Theorems, proofs and the empirical evidence should fix it. Can you believe there was a time when the world was against Yann LeCun because everyone speculated neural networks don't work for complex scenarios? Both points of views Sutton's, Brookes' are utter speculations as we cannot generalize or learn anything meaningful from them. Both of them are saying: "Since I don't know for sure how we're going to improve the AI in the long run therefor he's what I suspect the right approach is". They are even looking at the same history of AI is seeing different things. Go figure now. In mathematics old tricks only get you so far. The hard problems in a particular moment in time can only be overcome by deploying new tricks. Why wouldn't that be the case in the AI space? Hard coded rules, got us started. Then more computation made the next step. Then we mixed the two. Then we created more purposefully handcrafted architectures such as CNN. Then we manually annotated millions of data points. Then GANs came along to fix some stability issues. What's the next trick now? Don't worry, since no one knows both authors are just speculating.