[indifferentalex]

Not on their radar, or their slides at least: Natural Language Processing based rule-based brute-force artificial intelligence (that could be augmented through sensors/motors that allow interaction with the external world). A Vulcan-like (Star Trek) AI, what do you think? Might be easier to simulate the entire brain, on the other hand it might be doable and bridge the gap to general AI.

[nopinsight]

Rule-based NLP has been tried for several decades and has (very) limited success in the real world. Current systems based on deep learning beat it for most complex tasks. DeepL, which was on HN front page a few days, is the latest example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15122764

[orthoganol]

You're going to have to elaborate on complex tasks. I would argue the majority of successful, money generating software based in NLP/ NLU, i.e. the majority of the industry, is "rule based" (used in a general sense to mean non DL). Personal assistants, search, chatbots, etc.

[visarga]

It's called the self driving car - an AI that interacts with the world. It will be a launching pad to other AI agents.

[shagie]

At a more general level, you may find the book Society of the Mind interesting ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Mind ). In this, Minsky proposes simple (mindless) agents that then are combined together to form a mind. That our mind is interacting with the world and launching agents to deal with things - that our own mind may be built this way.

Yes, its a bit old (1986) and the current machine learning techniques have dated it - what was theory at one time is reality in places. Still a good book to read and think about.

[fspear]

Interesting read...I actually came to this very conclusion after an amazing mushroom trip when I was watching the movie "her". I actually drew schematics of how I envisioned the whole system would work lol.

[taneq]

Minsky's 'society of mind' is actually not far from modern techniques, where deep neural nets have multiple distinct parts that solve different parts of the problem using each others' outputs. (Not to mention explicitly multi-part methods like actor-critic).

[crypticlizard]

With regards to Vulcan emergence, I do believe we are in for that soonish; it's an archetypal depiction that consumers desire. Biotech, my friend, genetic enhancement. We can make ourselves smarter with genetic enhancement. We can even give ourselves the vulcan mind meld, and everything else exceptional about Spock. I do think the human brain substrate is exceptional, worthy of improving upon. I wish we talked more about so called "brainpower extension technologies", hopefully one day. I bet cats talk in ten years, it's only logical, consumers love cats & the companies can sell them by the millions.

[red75prime]

"I want to go out". The door is opened. "Lemme think a bit. Nah, I just want the door open". We can't have the door open at all times! "Who do you think you are for me to care? You are a human, invent something."