What did he get right? While Hinton, LeCun, and others were laying the foundations of deep learning in the 80s, Hofstadter was writing expert systems in Lisp.
It’s not my goal to denigrate Lisp. I think Lisp is great. I learned programming with Dr Racket. But Hofstadter’s contribution to our understanding of intelligence is somewhere between ”negligible” and ”counterproductive.”
Certainly it's very useful for training ML models but their relationship to intelligence has yet to be determined.
Thanks!
OK, so this is basically a connectionist model of mind approach?
I can definitely see this as an ancestor of current neural network approaches, and I now have some idea of what you mean by distributed representations.
I mean no disrespect here, but this has not contributed to our understanding of intelligence at all. It's proved useful in getting large datasets to perform certain actions (like vision and speech), but those are not necessarily the same thing at all.
It's a massive, massive advancement in the field of statistics and learning from data, but doesn't seem to map to my conception of intelligence at all.
(as you may have guessed, I'm sceptical that statistical learning approaches will lead to human-level intelligence).
You think ”learning from data” has nothing to do with ”intelligence” ?