Considering that the backpropagation and variants thereof gained significant commercial/industrial adoption while "monkey and banana" type problem solving syste

Considering that the backpropagation and variants thereof gained significant commercial/industrial adoption while "monkey and banana" type problem solving systems mostly failed, I think his criticism of artificial neural networks is quite unwarranted. The entire change has been that people aren't trying to go for 'general intelligence'. They approach it purely as a statistics problem. We have some data, what can we do with the data, how accurately can we do that?