AI Theory and Practice: A Discussion on Hard Challenges and Opportunities Ahead

We have quite an interesting and esteemed panel of experts -- passionate researchers in the field of artificial intelligence, investigating different aspects of AI. The idea is to ask the panelists to share their thoughts about the key challenges ahead in theory and practice across the broad constellation of research in artificial intelligence, which includes quite a few subdisciplines -- and, in fact, if you asked a large number of researchers, "What is the main field of the people on this panel?" So, we have a variety of people here with different interests and backgrounds that I asked to talk about not just the key challenges ahead but potential opportunities and promising pathways, trajectories to solving those problems, and their predictions about how R&D might proceed in terms of the timing of various kinds of development over time. I asked the panelists briefly to frame their comments sharing a little bit about fundamental questions, such as, "What is the research goal?" Not everybody stays up late at night hunched over a computer or a simulation or a robotic system, pondering the foundations of intelligence and human-level AI.