> Neural networks can only associate words or the equivalent in images. They don't actually know what words or images mean.

Well this begs the question of what it means to “actually know what words or images mean”.

I would posit that we don’t actually know that we are any more advanced than this.

You see an image of a computer and you know what the computer is and what it means. But that’s because your brain matches the image of the computer to computers you’ve already used and your experiences with those computers. What is different about neural networks?