A Roadmap towards Machine Intelligence

A machine capable of performing complex tasks without requiring laborious programming would be tremendously useful in almost any human endeavor, from performing menial jobs for us to helping the advancement of basic and applied research. Given the current availability of powerful hardware and large amounts of machine-readable data, as well as the widespread interest in sophisticated machine learning methods, the times should be ripe for the development of intelligent machines. Still, since "solving AI" seems too complex a task to be pursued all at once, in the last decades the computational community has preferred to focus on solving relatively narrow empirical problems that are important for specific applications, but do not address the overarching goal of developing general-purpose intelligent machines. In this article, we propose an alternative approach: we first define the general characteristics we think intelligent machines should possess, and then we present a concrete roadmap to develop them in realistic, small steps, that are however incrementally structured in such a way that, jointly, they should lead us close to the ultimate goal of implementing a powerful AI. The article is organized as follows.