Basic instincts

Matthew Hutson – Science

This article is an interesting complement to one from last week which argued that AI is harder than you think. It builds a related argument from a slightly different starting point: that big data driven approaches to artificial intelligence have been demonstrably powerful in the short term, but may never break through to produce general problem solving skills. That’s because there is no solution in sight to the problem of creating common sense – which turns out not to be very common at all. Humans possess some basic instincts which are hard coded into us and might need to be hard coded into AI as well – but to do so would be to cut across the self-learning approach to AI which now dominates. If there is reason to think that babies can make judgements and distinctions which elude current AI, perhaps AI has more to learn from babies than babies from AI.

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