AI and the limits of language

Article link here. It's the difference between Chomsky and Lakoff on language, and between 1st and 2nd gen cognitive science. Some excerpts:

"The underlying problem isn’t the AI. The problem is the limited nature of language. Once we abandon old assumptions about the connection between thought and language, it is clear that these systems are doomed to a shallow understanding that will never approximate the full-bodied thinking we see in humans. In short, despite being among the most impressive AI systems on the planet, these AI systems will never be much like us."

"A dominant theme for much of the 19th and 20th century in philosophy and science was that knowledge just is linguistic — that knowing something simply means thinking the right sentence and grasping how it connects to other sentences in a big web of all the true claims we know. The ideal form of language, by this logic, would be a purely formal, logical-mathematical one composed of arbitrary symbols connected by strict rules of inference. [...] This view is still assumed by some overeducated, intellectual types."

 

"Critics are right to accuse these systems of being engaged in a kind of mimicry. This is because [their] understanding of language, while impressive, is shallow. This kind of shallow understanding is familiar; classrooms are filled with jargon-spouting students who don’t know what they’re talking about — effectively engaged in a mimicry of their professors or the texts they are reading."

 

"But humans don’t need a perfect vehicle for communication because we share a nonlinguistic understanding. Our understanding of a sentence often depends on our deeper understanding of the contexts in which this kind of sentence shows up, allowing us to infer what it is trying to say. [...] But research suggests that the amount of background knowledge a child has on the topic is actually the key factor for comprehension."

 

"Abandoning the view that all knowledge is linguistic permits us to realize how much of our knowledge is nonlinguistic. [...] Humans learn a lot directly from exploring the world, which shows us how objects and people can and cannot behave. The structures of artifacts and the human environment convey a lot of information intuitively."

 

"The deep nonlinguistic understanding is the ground that makes language useful; it’s because we possess a deep understanding of the world that we can quickly understand what other people are talking about. This broader, context-sensitive kind of learning and know-how is the more basic and ancient kind of knowledge, one which underlies the emergence of sentience in embodied critters and makes it possible to survive and flourish."