Just to demonstrate, one the most common books during period, "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, 2nd ed" by Norvig, 1080 pages, has less than one (1!) page dedicated to ANNs. I personally think Norvig is an idiot with regards to Artificial Intelligence, and his book (used in 1500 schools in 135 countries and regions) singlehandedly slowed down the progress of AI by a few years, until a new generation of students outgrew this archaic book.
Published in 2002. At that point, ANN research had reached a pretty hard plateau with very few tangible results. Faulting Russel and Norvig for not going into depth about ANNs is kind of like faulting Richard Feynman for not going into depth about quantum computers in the Feynman Lectures.
Also, a lot of the subsequent work and breakthroughs on ANNs has been done at Google under Norvig's leadership as Director of Research.
Norvig had to be pretty clueless to decide ANNs are such a dead-end, that they don't deserve even a chapter in his book, where all around him there are biological living proofs that neural networks are probably a pretty good bet for AI...
(Note: I held the same opinion in the mid 90s when I reviewed his 1st edition and I'm definitely no Feynmann-level. It's just common sense.)
100 years ago you would have been arguing that all around you are living proofs that ornithopters are probably a pretty good bet for artificial flight. You would have been wrong about that too.
All I'm saying is, Norvig should have been more humble and included a chapter or two about ANNs, with all the research accumulated thus far, instead of betting 100% for the symbolic approach. Let the next generation of students learn both approaches and decide for themselves. It's sad that a whole generation of students was taught AI from this archaic book.
No, that is not all you're saying. You opened with this:
"I personally think Norvig is an idiot with regards to Artificial Intelligence,"
Not only did you lob an ad hominem at one of the most respected members of the community simply for making an editorial decision 18 years ago that you happen not to agree with today, you did it from a newly created anonymous HN account, and then you tried to deny it. Your conduct here has been thoroughly dishonorable. You should be ashamed of yourself.
What is shameful was the extreme shunning of the mainstream scientific community to ANNs, in 90's-00's decades, to the point that it was considered career suicide to publish a ANN paper. I believe Yann LeCun has said similar things in the past[0], reminiscing the time when it took him several years(!) to get an ANN paper accepted for publication.
[0] http://yann.lecun.com/ex/pamphlets/publishing-models.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptrons_(book)
applied rigorous math (e.g. when computer science was new) to prove that a certain kind of single-layer neural network couldn't solve certain problems. (Can't learn XOR) It is like proving that it takes N log N comparisons to sort N items.
This dampened interest in neural networks for a long time but the "geometrical thinking in hyperdimensional space" is what the field is all about today.
I think the aversion to ANNs during the 90s was more philosophical and aesthetic - ANNs math is indeed "ugly" compared to symbolic logic, bayesian inference, SVM (in the 00's), and many other traditional AI methods.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_neural_n...
Those handwritten digits that are a scourge today (e.g. 'would any of these methods work on a different set of symbols?' is unasked) came from a competition to develop a commercial zip code reader for the U.S. Postal Service post back in the day of the Apple Newton. He won it!
I was a bagman for text classification data in the early 2000's and his reviews of the results you got using methods of the time (Naive Bayes, Rocchio, Perceptron, SVM) showed a depth of thought and attention to detail which helped me pick and choose tools to make classifiers with fairly predictable performance and development paths.
GPT-3 on the other hand does a good job of spouting nonsense like Peter Thiel and that has something to do with it's emotional appeal. People make fun of it and laugh at the mistakes it makes like those videos where somebody kicks down one of those Boston Robotics dogs: it's just good enough to be an object for those sort of feelings.