This article basically makes Gary Marcus's argument, and the argument is getting a bit tired. Geoff Hinton puts it more succinctly than I could: https://twitte

This article basically makes Gary Marcus's argument, and the argument is getting a bit tired. Geoff Hinton puts it more succinctly than I could: https://twitter.com/tabithagold/status/1070736319901519876 https://twitter.com/tabithagold/status/1070736319901519876 https://twitter.com/tabithagold/status/1071189769499996161 https://twitter.com/tabithagold/status/1071189769499996161 "....The old-fashioned car manufacturers said 'We believe in electric motors too, and we can derive electric motors by injecting petrol into the engine." There is a persistent lure to symbolic AI, and it is the lure of anthropomorphization, of thinking that AI must be smart in the way humans are smart, by manipulating symbols. But natural language is not so much a central expression of machine intelligence as it is of human intelligence. Humans confuse linguistic aptitude with intelligence. Symbolic manipulation will be at best an API by which machines can relate to humans as the machines get smarter and smarter. Symbolic tools that conform to the bandwidth limitations of humans, which are constraints that our current machines don't face. (Historically they did, and symbolic AI made more sense then, since neural-net training was unfeasible.) The lure of symbolic AI puts us in the bondage of old ideas, as Keynes would say. Symbolic AI is the equivalent of replacing our economy's fiat currency with an arbitrary supply of a yellow mineral. I could go on, but I'll just link to this page, for those who are interested: https://pathmind.com/wiki/symbolic-reasoning https://pathmind.com/wiki/symbolic-reasoning