Linguistics for the Age of AI, a book by two scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, discusses the shortcomings of current approaches to natural language understanding (NLU) and explores future pathways for developing intelligent agents that can interact with humans without causing frustration or making dumb mistakes. Current AI systems “are not humanlike: they do not know what they are doing and why, their approach to problem solving does not resemble a person’s, and they do not rely on models of the world, language, or agency,” they write. “Instead, they largely rely on applying generic machine learning algorithms to ever larger datasets, supported by the spectacular speed and storage capacity of modern computers.” Link