<i>Artificial neural networks ignore neurophysiology, so even when they work, they tell us very little about how the brain works.</i><p>That is completely wrong. People like Geoff Hinton spend most of their time thinking about how the brain works (indeed, his background is cognitive psychology). The &quot;convolution&quot; part of convolution neural networks is designed to mimic how the optic nerve interfaces with the brain.<p><i>I keep hearing claims that symbolic AI is the wrong approach for anything, and that it failed. Yet there were quite a few successes (expert systems, discovery learning, common sense reasoning, for example) before sources of funding dried up.</i><p>The funding dried up because they ran into the limits of what is possible.