Did the Man Eat the Hamburger?

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You riff on it quite a bit in a very effective way to talk about language, how subtle languages and bent out of shape doesn't mean that you're not going to have to be able to do it. I kind of stole that idea from Roger Shank, an old time, AI natural language person who had these little stories like that and asked those kinds of questions. And also, John Searle, a philosopher who used that example of eating a hamburger to talk about whether machines could really understand anything.

Computer Scientist and author Melanie Mitchell of Portland State University and the Santa Fe Institute talks about her book Artificial Intelligence with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Mitchell explains where we are today in the world of artificial intelligence (AI) and where we might be going. Despite the hype and excitement surrounding AI, Mitchell argues that much of what is called "learning" and "intelligence" when done by machines is not analogous to human capabilities. The capabilities of machines are highly limited to explicit, narrow tasks with little transfer to similar but different challenges. Along the way, Mitchell explains some of the techniques used in AI and how progress has been made in many areas.