Council Post: Symbolism Versus Connectionism In AI: Is There A Third Way?

It's an essential prerequisite for deciding how we want critical decisions about our health and well-being to be made -- possibly for a very long time to come. To understand why the "how" behind AI functionality is so important, we first have to appreciate the fact that there have historically been two very different approaches to AI. The first is symbolism, which deals with semantics and symbols. Many early AI advances utilized a symbolistic approach to AI programming, striving to create smart systems by modeling relationships and using symbols and programs to convey meaning. But it soon became clear that one weakness to these semantic networks and this "top-down" approach was that true learning was relatively limited.