[LINK] Machine Learning Was: Re: Robot cars and the fear gap

[David Lochrin]

I've been trying to resist the temptation to buy into this subject yet again...(:-)

On 2016-07-26 06:41 Roger Clarke wrote:

>> Of course if you are reading this 50 years in the future and we've figured out the algorithm for Strong AI, then this whole post will all seem a little quaint.
> 
> It's quaint, but not for the reason he thinks.  The quaintness lies in the naive belief that there's such a thing as "the algorithm for Strong AI".

Yes indeed.  Strong AI isn't well defined but, at the very least, it means a computer which can manipulate "symbols" received from the external world as well as (indistinguishably from) conscious, sentient beings such as ourselves.  As has been pointed out before in Link, It's an idea which has been around since the early 1960s but hasn't thus far progressed any further.

The problem with it was famously pointed out by John Searle.  Conscious minds attach meanings to symbols, and that is _not_ the same as symbol correlation.

But the whole article seemed to me to be confused, and even to equate AI with statistical factor analysis.

David L.