«It seems to me to be extremely unlikely that machimes could ever reach the level of humans on translation, reading comp...

«It seems to me to be extremely unlikely that machimes could ever reach the level of humans on translation, reading comprehension and the like by learning exclusively from online data, with essentially no real understanding of the language they process. Language relies on common-sense knowledge and understanding of the world.»Like Prof. Melanie Mitchell (though her words are from 2019), I am skeptical too, to put it mildly, by my daily experience in scientific research. Everyday in my lab, in 2026, we struggle to segment neurons and intracellular structures from electron microscopy image volumes, and from light-microscopy volumes, where humans have no problem whatsoever other than: it takes us too much time. We struggle to understand the data in scientific manuscripts, and to distill the necessary insight for our own research. We struggle to write software and maintain computing infrastructure. We struggle to come up with the right analytical approaches to the data we collect. We strug...