Do Machines Really Understand Meaning? (Again)

The adventure of artificial intelligence (AI) is based on a revolutionary idea, namely, that machines are able to understand and produce linguistic acts endowed with meaning. Over the past decades, this idea has gained acceptance in the scientific community, but its consequences for human nature were not really appreciated. Recent developments in AI, due especially to Deep Learning (DL), have changed things dramatically by creating computer architectures capable of performing previously impossible tasks in areas such as image recognition and language understanding. Criticisms that were raised decades ago against this possibility have thus been revived. These criticisms are no different in argument from those made in the first place. The reason they are being raised again is because of the social impact that the new machine performances have been able to achieve, and is not driven by truly scientific reasons, which indeed prove to be inadequate when compared to the more recent artificial semantics based on deep neural networks.