Early AI systems tended to constrain themselves to micro-domains that could be sufficiently described using simple ontologies and binary predicate lo… - Joscha Bach

[W]e saw that mental representation is about percepts, mental simulations, conceptual representations... [C]onceptual representations give us concept spaces, and... these concept spaces... give us an interface for our mental representations we can use to address and manipulate them, and we can share them in cultures. [T]hese concepts are compositional. We can put them together to create new concepts. ...[T]hey can be described using higher dimensional vector spaces. They [vectors] don't do mental simulation and prediction, and so on, but we can capture regularity in our concepts with them.

Arguably most people are not generally intelligent, because they don't have to solve problems that make them generally intelligent. ...[I]t's not yet clear if we are smart enough to build AI and understand our own nature to this degree... [I]t could be a matter of capacity, and for most people it's... a matter of interest. They don't see the point because the benefits of attempting this project are marginal, because you're probably not going to succeed... and the cost... requires complete dedication of your entire life.

This book is an attempt to explain cognition—thought, perception, emotion, experience—in terms of a machine, that is, using a cognitive architecture.