No one except Descartes: "I think therefore I am." But all this does is underline that natural language is a vague mesh of concept categories anchored to words

No one except Descartes: "I think therefore I am." But all this does is underline that natural language is a vague mesh of concept categories anchored to words with multiple overloaded meanings. One of the reasons philosophy exists is because sometimes it attempts to untangle the overloading. The argument about AI is no different, but with the complication that the marketing concept mesh has different requirements to the research concept mesh, and both are different to "Make this work by next Tuesday" mesh. Google used to have an ancestor of word2vec which tried - very crudely - to map some of these meshes. Predictably it was much better at mapping word meshes than concept meshes, but it was still an interesting approach. The underlying problem is that we literally don't have a clear representation system for these concept meshes. Words are overloaded, code and math are too specific in their different ways. The various shades of ML are still too concrete. So we're going to keep having these debates until someone invents a representation system for natural language concept maps that isn't based on verbal approximations.