Since the article is paywalled, it may be helpful to excerpt the key parts or say what you think Searle's argument is. I imagine the trivial inconvenience of having to register will prevent a lot of people from checking it out.

I read that article a while ago, but can't remember exactly what it says. To the extent that it is rehashing Searle's arguments that AIs, no matter how sophisticated their behavior, necessarily lack understanding / intentionality/ something like that, then I think that Searle's arguments are just not that relevant to work on AI alignment.

Basically I think what Chalmers says in his paper The Singularity: a Philosophical Analysis.

As for the Searle and Block objections, these rely on the thesis that even if a system duplicates our behavior, it might be missing important “internal” aspects of mentality: consciousness, understanding, intentionality, and so on. Later in the paper, I will advocate the view that if a system in our world duplicates not only our outputs but our internal computational structure, then it will duplicate the important internal aspects of mentality too. For present purposes, though, we can set aside these objections by stipulating that for the purposes of the argument, intelligence is to be measured wholly in terms of behavior and behavioral dispositions, where behavior is construed operationally in terms of the physical outputs that a system produces. The conclusion that there will be AI++ in this sense is still strong enough to be interesting. If there are systems that produce apparently superintelligent outputs, then whether or not these systems are truly conscious or intelligent, they will have a transformative impact on the rest of the world. (emph mine)