A Refreshing, No-Fluff, No-Buzzword Perspective on Artificial Intelligence

I encountered this refreshing and excellent summary of Artificial Intelligence by John Launchbury, the Director of DARPA’s Information Innovation Office (I2O). Thanks Frank van Harmelen for posting this!

No fluff. No buzzwords. It is crisp and succinct explanation of the state of AI today and where it is going. Deep learning wasn’t even mentioned!

The quickly summary is that AI up to now can be summarize in two waves:

First Wave: Handcrafted Knowledge which is very good at reasoning but not very good a perceiving the outside world. It is not good for learning nor abstracting.

Handcrafted Knowledge: Enables reasoning over narrowly defined problems. No learning capability and poor handling of uncertainty

Second Wave: Statistical Learning which is good a perceiving and learning but it is not so good for reasoning and abstracting.

Statistical Learning: Nuanced classifications and predication capabilities. No contextual capability and minimal reasoning ability.

The next Wave, noted as Contextual adaptation is where systems can construct explanatory models that explain real world phenomena. 

My take away from this is that GOFAI (Good Old Fashion AI) is still active and relevant and by combining it with Machine Learning, we will enter the next wave of AI which can provide answers to the why (context).

The conclusion of this video is aligned with the takeaway message from Jim Hendler presentation at the 4th Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF): we need Human and AI together.

Hope you enjoy watching these videos as much as I did.