The beginning reminded me of a related essay by Eliezer Yudkowsky that lays out a similar argument for why old style AI was a hoax. https://www.lesswrong.com/p

The beginning reminded me of a related essay by Eliezer Yudkowsky that lays out a similar argument for why old style AI was a hoax. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zY4pic7cwQpa9dnyk/detached-lever-fallacy https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zY4pic7cwQpa9dnyk/detached-l... “Similarly, to this day, it is still quite popular to try to program an AI with "semantic networks" that look something like this: (apple is-a fruit) (fruit is-a food) (fruit is-a plant) You've seen apples, touched apples, picked them up and held them, bought them for money, cut them into slices, eaten the slices and tasted them. Though we know a good deal about the first stages of visual processing, last time I checked, it wasn't precisely known how the temporal cortex stores and associates the generalized image of an apple - so that we can recognize a new apple from a different angle, or with many slight variations of shape and color and texture. Your motor cortex and cerebellum store programs for using the apple. You can pull the lever on another human's strongly similar version of all that complex machinery, by writing out "apple", five ASCII characters on a webpage. But if that machinery isn't there - if you're writing "apple" inside a so-called AI's so-called knowledge base - then the text is just a lever.” -- It's also a good explanation of why the new style of AI appears not to be a hoax and actually works.