This argument, "You can't point out any limitations unless you yourself can do better", is not logical. --- The issue is that in order to be intelligent for a

This argument, "You can't point out any limitations unless you yourself can do better", is not logical. --- The issue is that in order to be intelligent for any useful meaning of the word, a program has to at least appear to do symbolic manipulation and to change its state as a result. If I tell some intelligent program, "I was born in London", I don't really care if it has actual symbols for me and for London, but I do expect to somehow "remember" this and "reason" about it. Later if someone asks the program, "Was Tom born in England?", I would expect it to answer, "Yes", and if asked "Why?", answer, "Tom said he was born in London and London is in England" - like a bright five-year-old would answer. --- Current AI programs do nothing like this, and there doesn't seem to be a path to this through machine learning and other systems for extracting statistical data from large corpuses. The idea that symbols will simply "emerge" from huge, static statistical engines seems like wishing for magic, not a research program. As a result, some simple tasks are impossibly difficult for machine learning systems. For example, support that I have come to the mistaken conclusion over many years that Arnold Schwarzenegger is German, because of the "corpus" of information I have seen. But if I meet him, and he mentions that he's Austrian, I will right away update my database without question, even though I met have read 100 things that made me believe he was German. This is impossible with any of the statistical systems we have. The only way to update them is to re-run them with more information. And it's the quantity of information that counts. The idea that Arnold's word on his own life might be much more important that 100 other sources cannot really be represented in general. This is an issue that needs to be resolved before we get to something we can call actually intelligent - it needs to be at least as smart as a 5-year-old person in being easily able to learn or correct facts one at a time, like "Arnold is Austrian".