How Can We Reduce the Gulf between Artificial and Natural Intelligence

Abstract

AI and robotics have many impressive successes, yet there remain huge chasms between artificial systems and forms of natural intelligence in humans and other animals. Fashionable “paradigms” o↵ering definitive answers come and go (sometimes reappearing with new labels). Yet no AI or robotic systems come close to modelling or replicating the development from helpless infant over a decade or two to a competent adult. Human and animal developmental trajectories vastly outstrip, in depth and breadth of achievement, products of artificial learning systems, although some AI products demonstrate super-human competences in restricted domains. I’ll outline a very long-term multi-disciplinary research programme addressing these and other inadequacies in current AI, cognitive science, robotics, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of mind. The project builds on past work by actively seeking gaps in what we already understand, and by looking for very di↵erent clues and challenges: the Meta-Morphogenesis project, partly inspired by Turing’s work on morphogenesis, outlined here: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/coga↵/misc/meta-morphogenesis.html