Ask HN: Will there ever be a resurgence of interest in symbolic AI?
I&#x27;m not an expert on this, but here&#x27;s my current understanding:<p>Symbolic reasoning&#x2F;AI is fantastic when you have the right concepts&#x2F;words to describe a domain. Often, the hard (&quot;intelligent&quot;) work of understanding a domain and distilling its concepts need to be done by humans. Once this is done, it should in principle be feasible to load this &quot;DSL&quot; into a symbolic reasoning system, to automate the process of deduction.<p>The challenge is, what happens when you don&#x27;t have an appropriate distillation of a complex situation? In the late eighties and early nineties, Rodney Brooks and others [1] wrote a series of papers [2] pointing out how symbols (and the definiteness they entail) struggle with modeling the real world. There are some claimed relations to Heideggerian philosophy, but I don&#x27;t grok that yet. The essential claim is that intelligence needs to be situated (in the particular domain) rather than symbolic (in an abstract domain). The &quot;behavior driven&quot; approach to robotics is stems from that cauldron.<p>[1]: Authors I&#x27;m aware of include Philip Agre, David Chapman, Pattie Maes, and Lucy Suchman.<p>[2]: For a sampling, see the following papers and related references: &quot;Intelligence without reason&quot;, &quot;Intelligence without representation&quot;, &quot;Elephants don&#x27;t play chess&quot;.