Also a lot of the things that symbolic researchers have been claiming connectionism can’t achieve turned out to be emergent properties of connectionist approaches
The "constant moving of goal posts" is one of the reasons why I think the two sides may converge: Engineers and scientists on the "connectionist" side could very well find ways to build AI systems that rely on "dumb" computation at massive scales to reason about symbols representing entities in the external world, simultaneously silencing and satisfying the critics -- who, as always and as ever, will say they were right all along.
His objections seem concrete and well supported — not just repeating “but does it really understand” over and over. (Admittedly there is some of this.)
Edit - Thank you for the links.
> There are also AI researchers seeking to bridge the two approaches.
I don't know if he does it with his work in practice, but throughout the interview Marcus says he wants to bridge the approaches. I think he references a really old talk or article from himself calling for that too.
In many ways, what we're seeing is a rehash of the "symbolic" versus "connectionist" approaches to AI, with critics like Marcus on the "symbolic" camp ("we need more understanding!") and the engineers and scientists who build AI systems, like Sutton, on the "connectionist" camp ("we need more computation!").
There are also AI researchers seeking to bridge the two approaches. Here's a recent example that seems significant to me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34108047 . Maybe we will eventually find that the "symbolic" and "connectionist" approaches are actually not different, as people like Minsky contended?