The Chinese Room only demonstrates that a program in itself is not sufficient to make something sentient, not that it is impossible to make sentient AI. It is fairly obvious that sentient creatures evolved from nonsentient ones at some point in our planet's history. For us to emulate this evolution and move from deep learning to strong AI is simply a matter of improving our understanding of neurocognition. Saying that we will never understand the brain well enough to reproduce this naturally occurring transition to sentience is as short-sighted as saying that man will never fly.
The Chinese Room only demonstrates that a program in itself is not sufficient to make something sentient, not that it is impossible to make sentient AI. It is fairly obvious that sentient creatures evolved from nonsentient ones at some point in our planet's history. For us to emulate this evolution and move from deep learning to strong AI is simply a matter of improving our understanding of neurocognition. Saying that we will never understand the brain well enough to reproduce this naturally occurring transition to sentience is as short-sighted as saying that man will never fly.