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Comment by bsaul | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand the critics this article receive here. It makes a very good counterpoint to all the hype the AI field is living at the moment, letting people from the general audience believe that algorithms will replace humans quite soon.

You may think it doesn't matter, but we've candidates to the presidential elections here in france building economical programs assuming "robots will do everything soon, so let's provide everybody with a universal revenue" as a likely immediate future.

It is extremely healthy to let people understand all we've been able to build so far are number crunching machines, which absolutely don't give any kind of meaning to the numbers they see passing by. Meaning as : i see what this number represents, and the consequences it has in real people's context.

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If the mind is that what a physical brain does, then a physical brain can in principle be simulated - by crunching numbers - to produce a mind (some have claimed that there must be more to it than that, but none have come up with a generally-accepted justification for their position.)

That's another discussion. The algorithm we're building right now aren't simulateors of consciousness or thought or anything usually attributed to intelligence. They're not even trying to, and the theoretical foundations they're built on aren't theories of consciousness, but pure statistics and signal processing.

True, but it does not follow from them being number-crunching machines; that is not a useful characterization in this context.

I don't think the mainstream of pragmatic Machine Learning/AI (deep neural networks, reenforcement learning, etc) is really working toward that goal. However there are some who are trying to create a "software simulation of the biological brain", Numenta being one. I think the limiting factor there is current instrumentation for use in neurological study.

> all we've been able to build so far are number crunching machines, which absolutely don't give any kind of meaning to the numbers they see passing by

All humans are just protein factories, which don't have any meaning other than electrical pulses and chemical reactions.

Apart from the fact that the OP was talking about giving meaning (Chinese room, anyone?), not having meaning, I think that too is up for debate.

For sure there's no clear, agreed, universal meaning, and most likely it does not have a meaning to you. Not everyone thinks like that, though.

edit: [OT] "have a meaning to you" or "for you"? I have the impression that there's a slightly different interpretation, and one might be offensive (not intended). Or are they the same?

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