Your answer to "What", predicate logic and the tangential question are very strongly related.
As a practical answer: both types (rule based vs deep learning) exists, in practice the latter performs way better.
Philosophically, I think it's a very good question too, to which I can only guess.
There's this saying that physics describes everything. From the smallest particle-wave interactions, to the movement of galaxies. It's just everything inbetween that it struggles with.
My guess: one can hope the world is best modelled as a clever differential equation. It might as well be. But the differential equation needs boundary conditions, and they're very high dimensional. Spending a lot of effort on measuring, memorizing these conditions, and then doing simple first order extrapolation, is more effective than trying to find the equation.
AI expert systems that make rule based decisions (unlike black boxes, eg. LLMs).
Here the proposal focuses on the "how" (decision tree over transformer models (*)). But more important to me is the "what": during training of these models, what will be their error function, what's their goal?
With LLMs today the goal is simple: be the best possible parrot. With these proposed models, what will be the goal?
The proposal does remind me of the EU commission vs parliament: the EU commission, who are unelected bureaucrats, decide what goes up for vote. EU parliament, who are elected, then votes.
Parliament can't even decide to undo existing laws, that proposal too has to come from the bureaucrats. I think it's one of the most undemocratic institutes that still calls itself a democracy.
(*) Tranformers aren't truly "black box", their interpretation is just harder to explain to humans without thorough understanding of algebra. But that's secondary to the "what" issue, to me.
Yes, I would never do this in Belgium. Because if the person has no (other) legal address, it's impossible to remove them from your home. Even if you have video proof of them regularly shitting in your cornflakes as you're eating.
And even then, I was just proud to have been part of the team with which I achieved the performance.
Isn't that what the patriotic people experience as well?
They vote, they pay taxes, they're sometimes politically active. From their point of view, they've contributed to the success of their country, and they're proud of it?
I quite like regionalism that doesn't align with national borders. An example would be "limburgers" have a strong shared identity, even as parts of it lie in Belgium, and parts of it lie in the Netherlands.
Fundamentally it comes down to this question, I think: people tend to like to be around people that've shared a same background, is that ok? And to what degree?
To get back out of the scifi, and into the sci: you might like to read these https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_machine and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixture_of_experts.