> Has symbolic AI ever produced anything that really demonstrates that it's the right approach?
No it hasn't. And the problems are clear - it's impossible to express anything in the rigid hierarchies that symbolic AI requires.
Representing "Britain" in geographic, language, political and economic hierarchies does not allow a model to do any reasoning about what "British sense of humour" means.
"Softer" structures that represent concepts as a "blob" in a multi-dimensional space is clearly a better approach (aka embeddings, and the even better representations that more complex models use are even better).
Representing "Britian" as blob in a multidimensional space that is adjacent to concepts like "satire" and "surreal" as well as people like "John Cleese" lets a model reason about what "British sense of humour" means without being specifically trained.
As GPT-J[1] says when prompted with "A good example of the British sense of humour":
A good example of the British sense of humour is found in George Orwell’s novel, The Lion and the Unicorn. It’s a satire on socialism that is much more sophisticated than anything in contemporary Leftist intellectual thought. It was written during the war, in 1944. The story opens with a visit to a pub in a fictional village in England. The pub is named the Unicorn, but Orwell (or George, as he calls himself) has decided to call it the Lion. He explains:
“The Lion is a pub, just like any other pub, where people drink in the evenings, and talk about their daily business and their hobbies and where they exchange ideas, views, points of view. But the difference is that nobody in the Lion ever argues about anything. They just sit there, saying nothing, drinking nothing, not even beer. People can come to the Lion and buy beer, and leave the Lion and not buy beer. Beer is freely on sale in the Lion, but nobody ever buys it.
(One should note that George Orwell's "The Lion and the Unicorn" is nothing to do with a pub where no one buys beer. BUT the joke is kind of exactly like a British sense of humour).
No it hasn't. And the problems are clear - it's impossible to express anything in the rigid hierarchies that symbolic AI requires.
Representing "Britain" in geographic, language, political and economic hierarchies does not allow a model to do any reasoning about what "British sense of humour" means.
"Softer" structures that represent concepts as a "blob" in a multi-dimensional space is clearly a better approach (aka embeddings, and the even better representations that more complex models use are even better).
Representing "Britian" as blob in a multidimensional space that is adjacent to concepts like "satire" and "surreal" as well as people like "John Cleese" lets a model reason about what "British sense of humour" means without being specifically trained.
As GPT-J[1] says when prompted with "A good example of the British sense of humour":
A good example of the British sense of humour is found in George Orwell’s novel, The Lion and the Unicorn. It’s a satire on socialism that is much more sophisticated than anything in contemporary Leftist intellectual thought. It was written during the war, in 1944. The story opens with a visit to a pub in a fictional village in England. The pub is named the Unicorn, but Orwell (or George, as he calls himself) has decided to call it the Lion. He explains:
“The Lion is a pub, just like any other pub, where people drink in the evenings, and talk about their daily business and their hobbies and where they exchange ideas, views, points of view. But the difference is that nobody in the Lion ever argues about anything. They just sit there, saying nothing, drinking nothing, not even beer. People can come to the Lion and buy beer, and leave the Lion and not buy beer. Beer is freely on sale in the Lion, but nobody ever buys it.
(One should note that George Orwell's "The Lion and the Unicorn" is nothing to do with a pub where no one buys beer. BUT the joke is kind of exactly like a British sense of humour).
[1] https://textsynth.com/playground.html