I think I understand better now.
Your proposal seems to involve throwing out “sophisticated mathematics” in favor of something else more practical, and probably more complex. You can’t do that. Math always wins.
The problem with math is that it’s too powerful: it describes everything, including everything you’re not interested in. In theory, all you need to make an AI is a few Turing machines to simulate reality and Bayes theorem to pick the right ones. In practice this AI would take an eternity to run. Turing machines live in a world of 0s and 1s, but we live a world made of clouds and birds, and a machine that talks in binary about clouds and birds would be complicated and hard to find. For a practical AI, you need a model of computation that regards nouns, verbs and people as the building blocks of reality, and regards Turing machines as very weird examples of nouns. This model would perform worse than a Turing machine if presented with a freakish alternate universe with no concept of time or space, but otherwise it’s fine. The hard part is compromising between simplicity and open-mindedness.
The same applies to neural networks. In theory, the shape can be anything you like as long as it’s big enough.(I’m leaving out a lot of details here, sorry.)Math is just the general framework that you build reality inside.
Empirical methods are upside down. You’re starting with the gritty details, hoping that as everything piles up something more powerful than bayesian inference will emerge. That won’t happen. Instead you’ll get a lousy, brittle copy of bayesian inference that can’t handle anything too different from what it was designed for… like a human.
(Edited for grammar)
So… what’s your proposal?
Aw come on, just one little hint? Most posts have a tl;dr paragraph or a “related to” to help people understand.
Computer science is probably not what you think it is. AI is included in it; but so is applied stuff like hacking. I think time (not watchmaking, just time) would make a better example.
Edited for trying/failing not to sound mean/weird.