Dr. Chomsky is right for the wrong reason, The system is not well designed… it is evolved!
Based on my experience as a computer programmer, thinking about how the brain works, my thoughts were that we have two kinds of brain, the lizard or subconscious brain that controls the fight or flight instinct. There is no time to think when faced with a hungry lion or bear, just pick the best option, fight or flight, and hope like hell it’s the right one. The other brain is the boolean rational brain that does the rational thinking.
To understand the subject of the article one first needs to understand what words are. In nature there are physical objects that we can sense, see, feel, touch, smell, or taste. Humans also have unembodied objects such as love, mercy, mathematics, nationality, right, wrong, and many others for which we create words so that we can communicate them. Words are for communicating. Other animals use scents, songs, colors, and other forms of communication.
Neural networks don’t think in the boolean sense, they just compute probabilities, which is the reason that current large language models can string together words but cannot tell fantasy from reality. That requires boolean thinking, the use of the other brain.
Real or fully functional AI will exist when neural networks can hand off to heuristics when boolean thinking is required. In other words, heuristics fact checking large language model output. It is interesting to note that Richard Feynman stated that science starts with a guess, an educated guess. The guess is then subjected to experiment to separate fact from fantasy. Large language models generate the educated guesses!
It’s interesting that scientists can discover where these brains reside inside our skulls and confirm the existence of brains with diverse functions.
Chomsky is wrong about other things as well but that becomes political.
The Captain