Real-World Challenges for AGI

Note: This post is a summary of a talk given at CERN Sparks! Serendipity Forum in September 2021, which can be viewed here. When people picture a world with artificial general intelligence (AGI), robots are more likely to come to mind than enabling solutions to society's most intractable problems. But I believe the latter is much closer to the truth. AI is already enabling huge leaps in tackling fundamental challenges: from solving protein folding to predicting accurate weather patterns, scientists are increasingly using AI to deduce the rules and principles that underpin highly complex real-world domains - ones they might never have discovered unaided.