Gary Marcus on Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

Subscribe: RSS

It’s been 7 years since my first interview with Gary Marcus and I felt it’s time to catch up. Gary is the youngest Professor Emeritus at NYU and I wanted to get his contrarian views on the major things that have happened in AI as well as those that haven’t happened. Prof. Marcus is an interesting interviewee not only because he is an expert in the field but also because he is a skeptic on the current approaches and progress towards Artificial General Intelligence but an optimist that we will eventually figure it all out. I can honestly say that I have learned a lot from Gary and hope that you will too.

During this 90 min interview with Gary Marcus we cover a variety of interesting topics such as: Gary’s interest in the human mind, natural and artificial intelligence; Deep Mind’s victory in Go and what it does and doesn’t mean for AGI; the need for Rebooting AI; trusting AI and the AI chasms; Asimov’s Laws and Bostrom’s paper-clip-maximizing AI; the Turing Test and Ray Kurzweil’s singularity timeline; Mastering Go Without Human Knowledge; closed vs open systems; Chomsky, Minsky and Ferrucci on AGI; the limits of deep learning and the myth of the master algorithm; the problem of defining (artificial) intelligence; human and machine consciousness; the team behind and the mission of Robust AI.

As always you can listen to or download the audio file above or scroll down and watch the video interview in full. To show your support you can write a review on iTunes, make a direct donation or become a patron on Patreon.

Who is Gary Marcus?

Gary Marcus is a scientist, best-selling author, and entrepreneur. He is Founder and CEO of Robust.AI, and was Founder and CEO of Geometric Intelligence, a machine learning company acquired by Uber in 2016. He is the author of five books, including The Algebraic Mind, Kluge, The Birth of the Mind, and The New York Times bestseller Guitar Zero, as well as editor of The Future of the Brain and The Norton Psychology Reader.

Gary Marcus has published extensively in fields ranging from human and animal behavior to neuroscience, genetics, linguistics, evolutionary psychology, and artificial intelligence, often in leading journals such as Science and Nature, and is perhaps the youngest Professor Emeritus at NYU. His newest book, co-authored with Ernest Davis, Rebooting AI: Building Machines We Can Trust aims to shake up the field of artificial intelligence