Hacker News Reader

> a computer can be programmed to detect instances of the word “betrayal” in scanned texts, but it lacks the concept of betrayal. Therefore, if a computer scans a story about betrayal that happens not to use the actual word “betrayal,” it will fail to detect the story’s theme.

Seems sorta odd to write a book today dismissing 1960s AI technology.

View on HN

Still has the same problem, lack of symbolic and functional or operational AI is still biting hard.

We need inferences and at least sets of labels as output to make sense of what the ML is doing, not simple matches or probabilities.

Somehow people often cite the Chinese room thought experiment discussing consciousness/subjective experience, but Searle originally intended it to be about exactly this split between syntax/semantics:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/#5.1

Reply on news.ycombinator.com