[stickfigure]

You keep repeating this assertion... but of course you would. Your neural networks were programmed with the idea of humans as something special and unique in the universe. It feels good to fire in those potentiation patterns, right?

Is someone who has never had vision incapable of understanding vision? How do they learn about it, if not through symbols? Is someone who has never had hearing incapable of understanding hearing? Their experiences may not be exactly identical to yours, but they aren't meaningless.

It is, at present, impossible to know what is/isn't required for a neural network to be "intelligent". Maybe symbol processing is enough, maybe it isn't. Right now the obvious source of improvement is increasing the size of the network. Let's see what happens with GPT50. Even without vision, you can describe your clothes to it and see if it likes them.

You're also discounting incredible progress in the field. I talk to my house. Cars drive themselves better than some humans I know. War is being fought by drones. Compared to the world I grew up in, this is amazing - and I'm not even that old. Progress isn't happening as fast as you might like, but it is happening.

[mjburgess]

Cars cannot drive themselves better than humans. And I'd say most self-driving car projects will be closed down within the decade as boon-doggles.

You do not talk to your house. Rather than using a dial which reads "off", you say "off".

"Progress" in the sense you mean isn't happening at all.

I have no pretensions about human intelligence; I do not think it is much above a dog's.

The issue is that computer "scientists" (ie., mathematicians") havent even bothered to understand a dog's -- or any animals. Or even intelligence.

The field which will produce any artificial intelligence is biology, not computer science. And very little progress is being made there; with pretty much all theoretical approaches to neuroscience, I think, wholy invalidated.

The computational approach has been a pointless detour/dead-end.