One is reminded of Dijkstra's line about how asking whether computers can think is like asking whether submarines can swim.
Thanks for the reply, I see what you're saying. Just to get metaphysical though, can't one argue that that's essentially what Newton did? Granted the machine he made was mathematically elegant, and the study of its components has been fruitful, but nonetheless it's the nature of physics that one never knows whether a formalism is really describing what's going on, or whether it might someday be superseded. Can we not imagine, say, a future where the art of warping spacetime is so well-understood that Newton's theories about a gravitational "force" are seen as just a bit of predictive machinery - useful for making approximations, but bearing no connection to the "truth" underneath?
That is, I picture an exchange where a deep-learning researcher says "our clustering algorithms found that languages A & B share characteristic C", and a linguistics professor replies "Aha, but the underlying truth is that A & B belong to the X class of languages, and X-like languages always have C". Intuitively the latter version somehow feels more robust, but in practice they're basically equivalent, and the first version arguably carries less baggage.