&gt; Why do people think they can build anything worthy of the name &quot;AI&quot; by just fucking around with neural networks<p>Are attributing that position to the author?  I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s what he&#x27;s saying at all (italics mine):<p>&gt; The frontier machine intelligence architecture <i>[at] the moment</i> uses deep neural nets.... Silicon brains of this kind...have recently surpassed human performance on a number of <i>narrowly</i> defined tasks...We are learning how to tune deep neural nets using large samples of training data, <i>but the resulting structures are mysterious to us</i>. <i>The theoretical basis for this work is still primitive, and it remains largely an empirical black art.</i>