To put some of this into starker contrast.. 40 years, 200 million dollars, and broken promises is the cost burned on something besides ML? Wait isn't the current approach burning that kind of cash in a weekend, and aren't we proudly backdating deep-learning to ~1960 every time someone calls it "new"? Is a huge volume of inscrutable weights, with unknown sources, generated at huge costs, really "better" than closed-source in terms of transparency? Are we not very busy building agents and critics very much like Minky's society of mind while we shake our heads and say he was wrong?
This write-up also appears to me as if it were kind of punching down. A "hostile assessment" in an "obituary" is certainly easy in hindsight, especially if business is booming in your (currently very popular) neighborhood. If you didn't want to punch down, if you really want to go on record as saying logic/search are completely dead-ended and AGI won't ever touch the stuff.. it would probably look more like critiquing symbolica.ai, saying that nothing like scallop-lang / pyreason will ever find any use-cases, etc.
It's been almost 6-8000 years since the advent of writing and we still cannot explain or understand human intelligence and yet we expect to be able to understand a machine that is close to or surpasses human intelligence? Isn't the premise fundamentally flawed?
Regardless of whether the project of explainable / understandable succeeds though, everyone should agree it's a worthy goal. Unless you like the idea of stock-markets, resource planning for cities and whole societies under the control of technology that's literally indistinguishable from oracles speaking to a whispering wind. I'd prefer someone else is able to hear/understand/check their math or their arguments. Speaking of 6-8000 years since something happened, oracles and mystical crap like that should be forgotten relics of a bygone era rather than an explicit goal for the future