Gary Marcus

"If we focus on endowing machines with common sense and deep understanding, rather than simply focusing on statistical analysis..." I'll never understand this false dichotomy. Not sure how an understanding of the world is built up if not by statistical analysis.

This is from the Amazon description of @GaryMarcus new book, though I'm guessing there's a high probability these are not precisely his words. Nonetheless, the same argument pops up in other places too.

yes. of course the point of writing the book is that argument is too subtle to capture in a jacket description or a tweet.

It is so subtle I've never quite grasped it. 'Endowing machines with common sense and deep understanding' in the obvious way was tried for 50 years (it's the obvious thing to try first) and didn't work. What's different about your proposal now? (ps. I'll read the book...)

Yes, please read the book. But also compare the argument you just made - “it’s already been tried, and failed” — to what might have been applied to deep learning in 2010.

From what I've read in recent critiques of DL, the arguments for "more than statistical analyses/pattern recognition" also tend to simply point at what DL can't do (yet). Is there something in your book that *doesn't* point out DL failures, and is different from F+P 1988?

inter alia, we examine in unprecedented depth what the problems for DL are, focusing on two detailed case studies, AND we also subject *symbolic approaches* to considerable scrutiny, & then make specific proposals about what problems in common sense have highest priority.

Ah - "unprecedented depth". Always works :-)