Yeah, was not impressed. Skipping over the (opinionated) survey of recent AI techniques (and their failure modes) and philosophic theories of cognition that is

Yeah, was not impressed. Skipping over the (opinionated) survey of recent AI techniques (and their failure modes) and philosophic theories of cognition that is the bulk of the paper, the only bit that claims to be novel (pp 29-31) is an argument I will summarize as follows: 1) any computational AI can be represented as a finite state machine or FSM (author calls it a finite state automata. Same thing.) 2) when said computational AI performs an "act of cognition" it (as a FSM) will iterate through a defined series of states, based on a defined series of inputs 3) It is possible to build a simpler FSM composed of a counter and a lookup table that would take the same series of inputs + the counter as an input, and produce the same state/output as the original computational AI 4) since the response to stimulus is identical, the 2 finite state machines are equivalent. 5) if the state machines are equivalent, they must be equivalently conscious 6) the counter+look-up table is obviously not conscious ("reducto ad absurdum") 7) from (6) and (5) no computational AI can be conscious To me, this argument fails in the following manner; the only way to actually construct the "simpler" finite state machine in step (3) above is to actually let the computational AI react with the world first and record its combinations of input and state. There is no way to predict what series of states an arbitrary FSM will go through in response to a particular series of inputs without actually running it. That would be equivalent to solving the halting problem. Any program can be encoded as an FSM. If you could predict the state sequence of such an FSM, you could tell whether the FSM would enter the 'halt' state. IMO this is analogous to arguing that: 1) the animatronic band at Chuck E. Cheese could be programmed to play identical music to that which has been (previously) performed by a human band (and recorded in perfect detail). 2) because they produce identical outputs the 2 bands are equivalent 3) if they are equivalent, they must equally be said to create original music 4) the animatronic band obviously doesn't create original music 5) from (3) and (4) no band can create original music He also elides any discussion of whether or not actual human intelligence manages to avoid the failure modes he uses to conclude that neural networks are not intelligent - e.g. he mentions adversarial examples fooling visual classifier networks without mentioning that "optical illusions" exist and people will reliably misperceive certain images in certain ways too. I actually agree that neural nets as they currently exist are aggressively stupid, but the author concludes way too much. TL;DR, author starts from a premise that there is something uniquely special about human consciousness that machines can't duplicate, and reaches the conclusion that there is something uniquely special about human consciousness that machines can't duplicate.