EmTech MIT: Giving machines common sense | Between the Lines - ZDNet

"We have lot of AI technologies, but no real artificial intelligence. MIT's Josh Tenenbaum leads a moonshot effort to close this gap by reverse engineering how children learn" insist John Morris for Between the Lines , former executive editor at CNET Networks and senior editor at PC Magazine.

Photo: emtechmit-tenenbaum

The world has seen remarkable progress in artificial intelligence in recent years, but general AI remains science fiction. One of the keys to making this leap could be the human brain. In a talk at the EmTech MIT conference this week, MIT professor Josh Tenenbaum described a new university moonshot to build machines that can learn like children.

"Why do we have all these AI technologies, but fundamentally no real AI?" Tenenbaum said. "We have machines that do useful things we used to think only humans could do, but none of these systems are truly intelligent, none of them have the flexible, common sense [of] . . . even a one-year-old."...

Tenenbaum concedes that we are still a long way from building machines that really learn like children--if we ever get there at all. And this is just one of several moonshots under MIT's Quest for Intelligence, which also includes teams working on Creativity, Emotion, Language and Perception. But each has a realistic milestone and interim engineering steps along the way, and he notes that the small steps can often lead to bigger things. The work in his Computational and Cognitive Science Group has already produced one spin-off, a startup called iSee that is applying these common-sense engines to self-driving cars.
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Source: ZDNet