Every time I read something by Searle, my blood pressure rises a couple of standard deviations.
One has to commend Searle though from coming up with such a clear example of what he thinks is wrong with the then-current model of AI. I wish all people could formulate their phylosophical ideas, right or wrong, in such a fashion. Even when they are wrong, they can be quite fruitful, as can be seen in the many papers (example still referring to Searle and his Chinese Room, or even more famously in the EPR paradox paper.
While going through the list of arguments for why to expect human level AI to happen or be impossible I was stuck by the same tremendously weak arguments that kept on coming up again and again. The weakest argument in favour of AI was the perenial:
Lest you think I'm exaggerating how weakly the argument was used, here are some random quotes:
At least Moravec gives a glance towards software, even though it is merely to say that software "keeps pace" with hardware. What is the common scale for hardware and software that he seems to be using? I'd like to put Starcraft II, Excel 2003 and Cygwin on a hardware scale - do these correspond to Penitums, Ataris, and Colossus? I'm not particularly ripping into Moravec, but if you realise that software is important, then you should attempt to model software progress!
But very rarely do any of these predictors try and show why having computers with say, the memory capacity or the FOPS of a human brain, will suddenly cause an AI to emerge.
The weakest argument against AI was the standard:
Some of the more sophisticated go "Gödel, hence no AI!". If the crux of your whole argument is that only humans can do X, then you need to show that only humans can do X - not assert it and spend the rest of your paper talking in great details about other things.