MIT will explore human intelligence in order to build AI systems, who learn like babies
Artificial intelligence, in the broad sense, is one of the hottest news topics of 2018, the researchers, end-user companies and governments responding to the global race for AI.
The research group of Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced to build an Artificial Intelligence system that’s as smart as a child drive the development of technological tools that can positively influence virtually every aspect of society.
MIT has announced Intelligence Quest , a new institute-wide initiative to learn more about human intelligence and create new AI-based technologies involving hundreds of researchers across the university.
The basic aim behind this is to understand human intelligence and apply that knowledge to develop intelligent machines.
The MIT Intelligence Quest or MIT IQ, based at an institution that has been at the forefront of artificial intelligence research since the 1950s, is a far-reaching academic effort to regain the initiative in AI.
Anantha Chandrakasan, the dean of MIT’s School of Engineering, says the plan is to try to “reverse-engineer human intelligence”.
In the longer term, says Josh Tenenbaum, an MIT professor of cognitive science and computation, the aim is to build “a machine that learns like a baby and then a child”, Anantha Chandrakasan added .
Josh Tenenbaum, an MIT professor of cognitive science and computation said the initiative will encourage researchers to investigate the societal implications of their work as they pursue hard problems lying beyond the current horizon of what is known.
She further said the aim will be to develop a machine that learns like a baby and then a child and how AI starts off as a blank slate and then learns patterns and data.
She further added that babies start with a genetic head start and a structure that allows them to learn more than data and patterns and a three-month-old baby is smarter than any AI system ever built.
MIT president Rafael Reif said more than 200 faculties working in fields including brain science, computer engineering, and robotics are planning to participate in the effort.
Adrian Weller, the senior research fellow at the Alan Turing Institute in London said we warmly welcome this MIT initiative. AI has made great progress in the last few years but we are still very far from enabling machines to do things that our human brains can do without effort.