Gary Marcus

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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

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Gary Marcus is not only a professor in psychology but also a computer scientist, programmer, AI researcher, and best-selling author. He recently wrote a critical article titled Ray Kurzweil’s Dubious New Theory of Mind that was published by The New Yorker. After reading his blog post I thought that it will be interesting to invite Gary on Singularity 1 on 1 so that he can talk more about his argument.   

During our conversation with Gary we cover a wide variety of topics such as: what is psychology and how he got interested in it; his theory of mind in general and the idea that the mind is a kluge in particular; why the best approach to creating AI is at the bridge between neuroscience and psychology; other projects such as Henry Markram‘s Blue Brain, Randal Koene‘s Whole Brain Emulation, and Dharmendra Modha‘s SyNAPSE; Ray Kurzweil’s Patern Recognition Theory of Mind; Deep Blue, Watson and the lessons thereof; his take on the technological singularity and the ethics surrounding the creation of friendly 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 cognitive scientist, and author of The New York Times Bestseller Guitar Zero: The New Musician and the Science of Learning as well as Kluge: The Haphazard Evolution of the Human Mind, which was a New York Times Book Review editor’s choice. You can check out Gary’s other blog posts at The New Yorker on neuroscience, linguistics, and artificial intelligence and follow him on Twitter to stay up to date with his latest work.