Murray Shanahan, DeepMind senior scientist and Imperial College professor, reflects on how academic AI research in the 1980s differed from today's media and corporate environment.
“Certainly when I was a PhD student and when I was a young postdoc, it was a fairly niche area. So you could just kind of like beaver away in your little, little kind of corner. Doing things that you thought were intellectually interesting and being reasonably secure that you weren't going to be bothered by anybody, but not like, it's not like that anymore.”
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More from Murray Shanahan
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Shanahan: Supercomputers will reach human brain scale computing within two years
“Well, depending on how you calculate it, we're pretty close to human brain scale computing already in the world's fastest supercomputers. And we will get there within the next couple of years.”
Shanahan: Physical embodiment is the origin of human intelligence
“No doubt when it comes to human intelligence and human consciousness Our physical embodiment is a huge part of that. It's in, it's where our intelligence originates from because what we, what our brains are really here to do is to help us to navigate and manip…”
DeepMind's DQN is arguably one of the first artificial general intelligences
“To my mind, DQN is in a sense, one of the very first general intelligences because it learns completely from scratch. You can throw A whole variety of problems at it, and it, you know, it doesn't always do that well, but in many cases it does pretty well.”
Shanahan: Symbolic AI ideas can be rehabilitated into deep reinforcement learning
“It made me realize that there were various ideas from symbolic AI that could be rehabilitated and put into deep reinforcement learning systems in a more modern guise. And so that's the kind of thing that I'm most interested in.”
Shanahan: Raw speech recognition has essentially been solved
“So speech recognition has more or less been cracked. The, they're just the process of turning the way raw waveform into text into, so that that's been cracked.”
Shanahan: Humans mistakenly project consciousness onto machines without actual agency
“We see someone there when there isn't, and of course that, for me, that was very interesting because it made me think about when we do that with machines, where we often, we do Maybe, you know, we think that there's someone at home when there isn't.”
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