User talk:Veritas Aeterna/GOFAI Draft

GOFAI
This page, formerly a redirect page to symbolic AI, has now been expanded to explain why GOFAI does not mean the same as symbolic AI, but instead refers to a specific approach that has long since been extended. The GOFAI term is still heavily used to caricature symbolic AI in a way that is now quite inappropriate. If the conflation of GOFAI and symbolic AI is not addressed the confusions will just continue.

The term could be addressed in the article on symbolic AI but that would be distracting from the main article, especially in explaining the conflations and showing examples required to justify the view.

I do not know exactly why the terms are conflated, but I suspect there are two reasons. One is just from a lack of familiarity with symbolic AI from newer students who are entirely and solely immersed in deep learning. The other reason may be a deliberate confusion to present deep learning as a new paradigm to totally replace symbolic AI, by ignoring symbolic machine learning to imply symbolic AI was solely fixated on expert systems, and further denigrating the use of symbols as "aether", as Hinton has said. Gary Marcus has pointed out there is considerable animus to the use of symbols in the current leaders of the deep learning movement.

Whatever the reason, it is time the confusions were addressed explicitly.

Veritas Aeterna (talk) 22:10, 19 September 2022 (UTC)