What is AI? Stephen Hanson in conversation with Geoff Hinton

Hanson: OK Geoff, thanks for joining me in this chat. This is for AIhub, and I've recorded three or four different conversations and it sort of started out thinking about– what is AI, but it really started out with an old friend of mine (we overlapped in Graduate School), Michael Jordan, who had written several articles (one in Medium) and I wrote a reply, which got some attention, mainly from Mike. He and I had this discussion and I disagreed so much with him I wanted to just see what was going on. Even if you haven't been paying attention you'll notice that something is happening. He was basically saying that the deep-learning phenomenon that's happening right now is – I almost think of it as like The Beatles, when Beatlemania started, we're in deep-learning mania. But, there's a lot of good things happening too, and as I pointed out to him, protein folding.. He said "I agree, but of course, they didn't solve the problem!". I said "you're creating these diminishing comments to create an atmosphere of'this is going to fail, the AI winter is going to come'. Why are you doing this? Don't you realize you're like the only person who doesn't get this". Hanson: Now I know that because I've debated him back in the 80s!, I will warn you this is a Gary Marcus free zone and I'm not going to talk about him. Hinton: In 2015 he made a prediction that computers wouldn't be able to do machine translation. Hanson: Yes, I know, but Gary is the most inconsistent… consistently inconsistent person I know. I wish people would stop taking him so seriously. Anyway, I knew Michael back in grad school and at that point he was always focused on the margins of things – I mean, important things. There's a sense in which he really is rejecting the whole DL thing strongly, and he's an interesting character in this. Now, you on the other hand have had, at least what I've heard you say in other contexts, that deep learning concerns you. I think that Yoshua Bengio has had a lot of concerns as well about DL. So we're doing classification and it works well, but how does it compare to human thought and reasoning, and all the wonderful things humans do?