More follow-up. I found this very informative book:

Metaphors We Live By, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. I think anyone interested in natural language processing will have to deal with the points raised in this book. I think that if the use of metaphor in everyday language is not handled properly, then "natural language" will become yet another technical term that means something close to the commonplace idea, but sufficiently different to render any insights generated questionable.

I have some ideas about how to move from "bag of words" analysis to something a bit more useful, but I have to test them before presenting them.

George, I wonder how your concerns can be addressed by the Cyc Project run by Doug Lenat of Cycorp (www.cyc.com) -- the longest continuously running project in AI? Stephan and Doug worked together when they were younger. Stephan said some years ago that before Alpha was announced, he connected with Doug to say that Alpha wasn't intruding upon Cyc's turf. Doug gave a thumbs up to Alpha.

The Cyc Project's goal is to endow automated reasoning with common sense. It splits human knowledge into diverse microtheories, each equipped with the modes of reasoning, discussion, idioms, etc. of that particular area of knowledge. There's a microtheory for mathematics, religion, organizations, physics, chemistry, fantasy, etc. His experts range from historians to mathematicians to comp scientists to Airborne Rangers. I wonder how this content could be tapped by Alpha (it may be worth asking Wolfram if they've investigated any potential WL-Cyc "collaboration").

Bob, we share a common perspective on history. I've started working on a WTC2019 presentation that discusses cliometrics (the mathematical modeling of history) -- let's see if the abstract flies. As you may recall from his WTC2017 talk, Kuba Kabala (Davidson College) does textual analyses (using WL) of documents from the medieval papacy. Hopefully he'll have another blockbuster for WTC2019 (Kuba, you still have an open invitation to talk to the Washington DC-Area Mathematica Special Interest Group when it relaunches at The Catholic University of America in the Spring).

George,

Your points are well taken, especially wrt computation being used to create art, music, or literature.

My own interests, though, are to use computation as a tool to study the humanities. My K-12 experience with history was as you described, and now with some years of experience in the real world I appreciate much better the need to study the motivation behind historical events and the trajectory of events and people that led up to the event of interest.

I liken the use of computation to help inform the study of the humanities much like that of a magnifying glass, microscope, electron microscope, ... making it possible to observe biology in every greater detail. I will still use my own mind to make conjectures and draw conclusions. The Eureka! moments are rare, but all the more rewarding because I was the one connecting the dots the algorithm helped me find.

Bob

Interesting to see philosophy posted on a Software applications forum. I am reminded of the Chinese puzzle box analogy used by Roger Penrose which posits a group of Chinese inside a box who use a computer algorithm to pass a Turing test in English successfully even though they have no knowledge of English, and hence no understanding of the questions posed by the examiner.

To say AI understands something is false because it is merely reacting to stimuli. However I believe those reactions can become more and more sophisticated to the degree that it will eventually become indistinguishable from the reactions of a human.