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I liked Kurzweil's response best: "As long as AI has any flaws or limitations, people will jump on these. By the time that the set of these limitations is nil, AI will have long since surpassed unaided human intelligence."

Watson isn't the end, it's a building block. It's true that it's been largely hyped to some degree, but I think that opens doors that wouldn't have been opened otherwise. Chomsky's dismissal seems too quick.

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Chomsky's point is that he doesn't think brute force AI really accomplishes much toward a theory of mind. He may be right or wrong about this, but it's an empirically testable point (over time).

He indicates that his inclination is toward a different research approach which is not brute force oriented (meaning it's more algorithmically/conceptually sophisticated but not fundamentally different).

This is why he trivializes the notion of "intelligence"... b/c he probably has a hard time calling the approach he favors intelligence, much less a far less intelligent brute force approach.

In Chomsky's world, intelligence essentially refers to "innate knowlege systems". If it's brute force than it's totally non-innate.

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