Gary Marcus: COVID-19 should be a wake-up call for AI

The global pandemic has been cited as a "wake-up call" for many things -- the environment, economic and social rights, and general global inequalities. However, scientist, author, and entrepreneur Gary Marcus thinks that the COVID-19 crisis should also be considered a wake-up call for AI. Speaking at the virtual Intelligent Health AI conference yesterday, Marcus lamented decades of missed opportunities to build a more robust artificial intelligence, arguing that too much attention has been placed on AI technologies that don't really help the world in any meaningful way. "We would like AI that could read and synthesize the vast, quickly growing medical literature, for example, about COVID-19," he said. "We want our AI to be able to reason causally, we want it to be able to weed out misinformation. We want to be able to guide robots to keep humans out of dangerous situations, care for the elderly, deliver packages to the door. With AI having been around [for] 60 years, I don't think it's unreasonable to wish that we might have had some of these things by now. But the AI that we actually have, like playing games, transcribing syllables, and vacuuming floors, it's really pretty far away from the things that we've been promised."