matter II media: mobile and web technology

Artificial intelligence, in any meaningful sense, doesn't exist. Every example of what is sometimes taken to be AI is in fact a case of the'robotic fallacy'1. This fallacy is to mistake an instance of seemingly intelligent behaviour for the existence of an underlying faculty of intelligence. That is, one sees or hears an AI program or robot say or do something which, if it were human, would be associated with a general level of intelligence. And one tends to assume it also has – or could come to possess – that intelligence. But in fact the behaviour fell into what, by human standards, is a very narrow and customised domain. There is little, if anything, else that the AI can offer in the way of apparently intelligent actions. And it's not a question of waiting a little while until researchers have worked out how to attain AI. There is a vast chasm they need to cross. And that chasm, it will be argued here, exists in part because of a failure to recognise the nature of symbolic systems. To make things more concrete, here is pseudocode for a type of'AI' program2 typified by Alexa, Siri and other virtual assistants or bots: Technology called machine learning turns the human's spoken words into text and performs'natural language processing' to break them down to fit a template of (greeting, name).