Searle makes two assertions: 1) Syntax without semantics is not understanding. 2) Simulation is not duplication. Claim 1 is a criticism of old-style Symbolic AI that was in fashion when he first formulated his argument. This is obviously right, but we're already moving past this. For example, word2vec or the recent progress in generating image descriptions with neural nets. The semantic associations are not nearly as…
I wouldn't be so critical of GOFAI. Much high-level reasoning either does or can involve symbol manipulation. There are some impressive systems, such as Cyc, which do precisely that. It isn't useful for low-level tasks like vision or walking, so other approaches are needed to complement it.
> but we're past the point of just manipulating empty symbols.
We've now reached the point where we can manipulate large matrices containing floating point numbers. I don't see how this makes systems any more conscious.