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What Went Wrong With AI?

David Eagleman says he grew up dreaming of having a robot companion like C-3PO, but all he got was the Roomba vacuum cleaner. Why has the field of artificial intelligence progressed so slowly?  
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What’s the Big Idea?

David Eagleman says he grew up dreaming of having a robot companion like C-3PO, but all he got was the Roomba vacuum cleaner. 

Why has the field of artificial intelligence progressed so slowly, even though we have thrown the best minds in the world at the problem since the 1960s?

Eagleman, who is a neuroscientist and the author of The New York Times bestseller Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, tells Big Think “if we want to solve the AI problem we need to approach it in the same way Mother Nature did.” In other words, while programers try to develop a single solution for a single problem, “the brain is this collection of sub-populations that all solve problems in overlapping ways.” 

Programmers need to build a machine that runs on “reinventing solutions and having overlapping solutions.” 

Watch the video here:

Image courtesy of Shutterstock

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