Steven Pinker: Um I have a question for uh both Noam and Martin,
that I think is on the minds of many people in this room, and I know it’s been expressed
in some of the questions that I’ve received by email prior to this event,
that there is a- a narrative in which the new direction of uh both artificial intelligence and cognitive science
is one that makes a great deal more use of probabilistic information
that is gleaned from enormous amounts of uh experience during learning –
this is uh uh manifested in branches of cognitive science such as uh neural networks and connectionism,
bayesian inference models, uh application of machine learning to intelligence,
many of the models both of Tommy Poggio and Josh Tennenbaum.
Uh in the classic work from the Golden Age, and indeed in many of the models since then,
including the models of generative grammar and models of semantic memory,
uh probabilities don’t play a big role. …

… (to read more)

Noam Chomsky /  ©2016