I suppose there are lots of papers and results that fall into the "only curve fitting" bucket, but there are many exciting results in recent years that have bee

I suppose there are lots of papers and results that fall into the "only curve fitting" bucket, but there are many exciting results in recent years that have been curve fitting + X, where ANNs formed part of a system with other components. While none of these approach the level of something you could have a meaningful conversation with (which was an ambitious bar introduced in the article) some do kind of consider multiple actions, work through consequences of each, and pick a single action. This looks a lot like a crude form of reasoning about causality and hypotheticals, though not quite along the lines Pearl would like to see. But they typically do that in the context of a specific task, with an enumerable set of available actions.