This is where I collect and write things, mostly on academe and artificial intelligence. Established in 2010, by Vaishak Belle.
There’s talk going around about the “brittleness” of symbolic AI.
I’ve used this qualifier too in some of my papers, but it’s worth nothing that there’s some nuance to this. Four dimensions are worth articulating, I think.
One notion of brittleness might stem from classical logic: classical semantics requires that the consequences of a knowledge base are true in every model of the knowledge base (KB). So if there are “mistakes” in the KB, there’s no way of getting out of such mistakes in the consequences, they’ll embrace every such mistake and take it as categorical truth. There’s work on how to include possibly conflicting observations, eg belief revision, Valiant’s robust logics /PAC-semantics.
A second and related notion is about the consequent needing to be true in all of the KB’s models (worlds). There’s ample work on non-classical semantics (e.g., fuzzy logic, where the consequences can be mapped into the real line), and probabilistic-semantics (where we get a number corresponding to the ratio of the KB’s models where the consequent is true).
A third notion is when the knowledge is specified by an expert. There are various approaches to inducing symbolic structures partially or fully from data (e.g., bayesian program induction, statistical relational learning, inductive logic programming).
A final notion is when the predicates in the theory map on to concrete immutable concepts. Eg the definition of the number “6” and “Belgian waffles”, which might be best characterized from image training data. Approaches such as DeepProbLog allow the mixing of symbolic background knowledge with fuzzy/probabilistic/neural concepts.
Taking all these into account, the brittleness is a straw man argument. And moreover, when researchers develop meta-level results (e.g., decidability of fragment, semantics of new logics), they can do this without committing to where the knowledge came from, and so are still valid.