Watson's marketing is obnoxious, but it's not just Watson. There is plenty of bullshit, ignorance, and pseudo-intellectualism to go around. Mind you, many of the technical fruits of AI itself, properly understood, are not bullshit (the name "AI" is misleading IMO; I wouldn't be able to tell you what distinguishes AI from non-AI because it seems largely a matter of convention rather than a substantive difference). The field offers plenty of useful techniques for mechanizing things people have had to do preiously. However, the very idea of a "thinking computer" is unjustifiable and superstitious. There's too much sloppy, superficial thinking.
The author of the article mentions concepts and indicates a distinction between them and word counting. Certainly, there is a difference between word counting and conceptualization, and it is patently obvious computers don't do the latter. But it's worse than that. Technically, computers aren't even counting words. They aren't even counting, nor do they have any concept of a word (we count words by first knowing what it is that we should be counting, i.e., words). What we call word counting when a computer does it is a process which produces, only incidentally, a final machine configuation that, if read by a human being, corresponds to a number. The algorithm is a proxy for actual counting. It is a process produced by thinking humans to produce an effect that can consistently be interpreted as the number of words (tokens) in a string. That's not thinking. There is zero semantic content and zero comprehension in that process, and no number of tortured metaphors or twisted definitions can change that. AI, as it becomes more sophisticated, is at best a composition of processes of the same essential nature. No degree of composition -- no matter how sophisticated or complex -- magically produces thought anymore than taking sums of ever more composed and expansive sequences of integers ever gets you the square root of two. It's not a mystery.
The author of the article mentions concepts and indicates a distinction between them and word counting. Certainly, there is a difference between word counting and conceptualization, and it is patently obvious computers don't do the latter. But it's worse than that. Technically, computers aren't even counting words. They aren't even counting, nor do they have any concept of a word (we count words by first knowing what it is that we should be counting, i.e., words). What we call word counting when a computer does it is a process which produces, only incidentally, a final machine configuation that, if read by a human being, corresponds to a number. The algorithm is a proxy for actual counting. It is a process produced by thinking humans to produce an effect that can consistently be interpreted as the number of words (tokens) in a string. That's not thinking. There is zero semantic content and zero comprehension in that process, and no number of tortured metaphors or twisted definitions can change that. AI, as it becomes more sophisticated, is at best a composition of processes of the same essential nature. No degree of composition -- no matter how sophisticated or complex -- magically produces thought anymore than taking sums of ever more composed and expansive sequences of integers ever gets you the square root of two. It's not a mystery.