Exciting progress in Artificial Intelligence – Joscha Bach

Joscha Bach discusses progress made in AI so far, what’s missing in AI, and the conceptual progress needed to achieve the grand goals of AI.
Discussion points:
0:07 What is intelligence? Intelligence as the ability to be effective over a wide range of environments
0:37 Intelligence vs smartness – interesting models vs intelligent behavior
1:08 Models vs behaviors – i.e. Deepmind – solving goals over a wide range of environments
1:44 Starting from a blank slate – how does an AI see an Atari Game compared to a human? Pac Man analogy
3:31 Getting the narrative right as well as the details
3:54 Media fear mongering about AI
4:43 Progress in AI – how revolutionary are the ideas behind the AI that led to commercial success? There is a need for more conceptual progress in AI
5:04 Mental representations require probabilistic algorithms – to make further progress we probably need different means of functional approximation
5:33 Many of the new theories in AI are currently not deployed – we can assume a tremendous shift in every day use of technology in the future because of this
6:07 It’s an exciting time to be an AI researcher

Joscha Bach, Ph.D. is an AI researcher who worked and published about cognitive architectures, mental representation, emotion, social modeling, and multi-agent systems. He earned his Ph.D. in cognitive science from the University of Osnabrück, Germany, and has built computational models of motivated decision making, perception, categorization, and concept-formation. He is especially interested in the philosophy of AI and in the augmentation of the human mind.

Joscha has taught computer science, AI, and cognitive science at the Humboldt-University of Berlin and the Institute for Cognitive Science at Osnabrück. His book “Principles of Synthetic Intelligence” (Oxford University Press) is available on amazon.