I'm not sure this is necessarily true. At a smaller scale, we didn't need to understand how humans play chess in order to build a good chess AI. I do think we

I'm not sure this is necessarily true. At a smaller scale, we didn't need to understand how humans play chess in order to build a good chess AI. I do think we need a better understanding of what we mean when we talk about intelligence, if we expect to recreate it. Francois Chollet has a good recent paper about this [1]. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.01547 https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.01547