This depends a little bit on what the goal of AI research is. If it is (and it might well be) to build machines that excel at tasks previously thought to be exclusively reserved to, or needing to involve, the human mind, then these bitter lessons are indeed worthwhile.
But if you do AI research with the idea that by teaching machines how to do X, we might also be able to gain insight in how people do X, then ever more complex statistical setups will be of limited information.
Note that I'm not taking either point of view here. I just want to point out that perhaps a more nuanced approach might be called for here.
> if you do AI research with the idea that by teaching machines how to do X, we might also be able to gain insight in how people do X, then ever more complex statistical setups will be of limited information
At the very least we know consistent language and vision abilities don't require lived experience. That is huge in itself, it was unexpected.
> At the very least we know consistent language and vision abilities don't require lived experience.
I don't think that's true. A good chunk of the progress done in the last years is driven by investing thousand of man-hours asking them "Our LLM failed at answering X. How would you answer this question?". So there's definitely some "lived experience by proxy" going on.
But if you do AI research with the idea that by teaching machines how to do X, we might also be able to gain insight in how people do X, then ever more complex statistical setups will be of limited information.
Note that I'm not taking either point of view here. I just want to point out that perhaps a more nuanced approach might be called for here.