What is AI? Stephen Hanson in conversation with Terry Sejnowski

Hanson: Terry, thanks so much for joining this videocast or podvideo, I don't really know what to call it. When I started trying to conceptualize what I was getting at, I wanted to talk to people who had a clear and obvious perspective on what they thought AI is. And you're particularly unique, and special in this context, because you have been consistent since… Well, there's a great book that you have a chapter in and I think Jim Anderson edited in 1981, called "Parallel Models of Associative Memory". Sejnowski: It's interesting you brought that up because I met Geoff Hinton in San Diego in 1979 at a workshop he and Jim organized that resulted in that book. It was my first neural network workshop. We were all interested the same things. There was no neural network organization or community at that time – We were a bunch of isolated researchers working on our own. Hanson: And probably not well appreciated, by talking about neural networks, or neural modelling. Sejnowski: We were the outliers. But we had a great time talking with each other. Hanson: Going back to the book, you had a chapter called skeleton filters in the brain. I think that was the name of it. Perhaps not the best title in the world, but still… "Skeleton filters" is a little scary, I gotta say. But, it was a really incredibly easy read – I just read it the other day again. And, in it, you're really going in a subtle way from biophysics, modelling a neuron and referencing everybody, you know Cowen, and everybody who'd developed a differential equation, or anything up to semantics and cognition. But biophysical modeling, this kind of category you might associate with biophysics of neural modelling, in that neurons and circuits matter and that's what we're modelling, for that purpose – that's the purpose of it. For example, I think you mentioned Hartline and Ratliff, and Limulus crab retina. And this provided an enormous amount of data well into the 60s where people were actually modelling and there were predictions and it was very tightly tied to the crab. Sejnowski: By the way, although it's called a Horseshoe Crab, and looks like one, Limulus has eight legs, so it's an arachnid.