I think Gary Marcus wanted AI research to uncover lots of interesting rules like “in English, you make verbs past tense by adding -ed, except …” because he wants to know what the rules are, and because engineering following psycholinguistic research is much more appealing to him than the other way around. Machine learning (without interpretability) doesn’t give us any tools to learn what the rules are.
I think Gary Marcus wanted AI research to uncover lots of interesting rules like “in English, you make verbs past tense by adding -ed, except …” because he wants to know what the rules are, and because engineering following psycholinguistic research is much more appealing to him than the other way around. Machine learning (without interpretability) doesn’t give us any tools to learn what the rules are.