Episode #86 – Basic Building Blocks of Artificial Intelligence – with Dr. John MacCormick

Dr. Roger Schank received his PhD from Stanford, taught at Yale, and altogether has spent around three decades attempting to solve the big problems of artificial intelligence.
In this interview, Dr. Schank talks about a kind of helpful “teaching” artificial intelligence that would go beyond Siri and help us to make the right decisions at the right times given our own objectives. He explains why he believes such a project is not on Google’s agenda, and what he believes might be required to create such an AI.

Joanne Pransky received her BA from Tufts University in the mid 1980’s, and began championing public awareness and exposure to robotics and AI technology, playfully calling herself the “first robot psychiatrist.” Since then, she’s been featured on CNN, The Discovery Channel, the Sci-Fi Channel, and even the Tonight Show with Jay Leno - aiming to expose the world to technology and it’s ethical implications.

Dr. Nils Nilsson was one of the early researchers in emerging technology back in the 1960s - graduating with his doctorate from Stanford before it had a computer science department.

Episode summary: Most NLP applications we hear about involve marketing, customer service, and other customer-facing functions - but that there are NLP-related opportunities in other back-end functions as well.  

Since the inception of the discipline of artificial intelligence (AI) in the 1950s, progress in the field has advanced at a rapid pace. We have seen the development of early neural networks, game AI, the Turing Test, and theories involving expert systems and intelligent agents, but according to Ben Goertzel, there is a specific element of AI today that is significantly missing.