How can there be experts on a subject that doesn't yet exist?
People tried to do AI in the 60s to 90s era. It is dubbed symbolic AI. It didn't work out. A good chance that it never will. Today machine learning algos and a bunch of automated statistics is called "Artificial Intelligence". It's not intelligence at all. Intelligence implies something more than I/O computation.
Also, it's more tricky than you'd think to narrow down what counts as intelligence. There aren't really any hard lines between an I/O program and an intelligent agent, even though they seem pretty far apart.
There are a few more binary measures in intelligence research, such as the mirror test, but at best they're only a small piece of the puzzle. There's no sudden point where everything clicks into place.
Of course, if you have such a good definition of intelligence, feel free to enlighten me.
If we found out that one species of chimp learns sign languages through a causal model while another learns it through an associative one (for example) we wouldn't label one more or less intelligent, because it's the end result that matters – don't you think?
Likewise, arguably the ultimate goals of AI are behavioural (machines that can think/solve problems/communicate/create etc.), even if it's been relatively focused on mechanisms lately. Any particular kind of modelling is just a means to that end. Precisely what that end is is still a bit hard to pin down, though.
What do you mean by "associative model"? That doesn't map to anything I've heard of in cognitive science, statistics, machine learning, or Good Old-Fashioned AI.
But actually, I would expect different behaviors from an animal that learns language via a purely correlational and discriminative model (like most neural networks) versus a causal model. Causal models compress the empirical data better precisely because they're modelling sparse bones of reality rather than the abundant "meat" of correlated features. You should be able to generalize better and faster with a causal model than with a discriminative, correlative one.
I'm not necessarily saying that different models lead to exactly the same behaviour. Clearly, chimps' models don't generalise as well as ours do and they don't have a language model that matches ours in capability, for example, which leads to different behaviour. But given that their behaviour is generally thought of as less intelligent as opposed to not intelligent at all, it seems like the mechanism itself is not the important thing.
Of course, that could be wrong – new evidence may come to light, after all. But even so, it doesn't make any sense to say that trying to understand and replicate intelligence is deluded, just because we don't know where that line is – because figuring out what intelligence is is exactly the problem that people are trying to solve. AI is one part of that, along with more empirical research in fields like cognitive science and biology.
Are people researching quantum gravity deluding themselves because they don't yet have a hard definition of quantum gravity? Figuring that out is exactly the point!
How much research had you done before you assertively proclaimed that those lines don't exist? Because it looks nothing like a smooth transition to me.
So that fuzzy logic, thats not AI anymore, thats a footnote in the EE control systems theory class, isn't it? And the face recognition is a parallel processing assignment in FPGA class, speech recognition is an advanced section in DSP theory class, etc.