Noam Chomsky on the Future of Deep Learning

For the past few weeks, I've been engaged in an email exchange with my favourite anarcho-syndicalist Noam Chomsky. I reached out to him initially to ask whether recent developments in ANNs (artificial neural networks) had caused him to reconsider his famous linguistic theory Universal Grammar. Our conversation touched on the possible limitations of Deep Learning, how well ANNs really model biological brains and also meandered into more philosophical territory. I'm not going to quote Professor Chomsky directly in this article as our discussion was informal but I will attempt to summarise the key take-aways. Noam Chomsky is first and foremost a professor of linguistics (considered by many to be "the father of modern linguistics") but he is probably better known outside of academic circles as an activist, philosopher and historian.