What I miss in these notes, and what I think is the main question we should be asking ourselves, is the question of the black-box approach. That is, do we understand what intelligence amounts to? On the one hand, we want to be able to say yes but on the other hand, we haven't been able after all these years to formalize the concept of intelligence in a satisfactory or even meaningful way. So the answer seems to be no. Moreover, do we even know what intelligence is?

Thus, should we instead be building black-box systems that behave seemingly intelligently without understanding why they behave intelligently? I.e. neural networks, deep learning? Is this a good investment? It seems so, at least in the short term. But what about the long term? I don't know the answer.

Having said that, I've been working for some time on non-monotonic reasoning and related subjects, which are typical symbolic logic approaches to AI, and I believe that what I am doing, while intellectually very worthwhile, is a dead end in the context of AI. I'm sometimes surprised at how easily we get money to get to work on this stuff. So I agree with the point that lack of funding is not the problem.