Voices in AI: David Cox

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Voices in AI – Episode 84: A Conversation with David Cox   By Byron Reese

Episode 84 of Voices in AI features host Byron Reese and David Cox discuss classifications of AI, and how the research has been evolving and growing

Listen to this one-hour episode or read the full transcript at www.VoicesinAI.com

Transcript Excerpt:

Byron Reese: This is Voices in AI, brought to you by GigaOm and I’m Byron Reese. I’m so excited about today’s show. Today we have David Cox. He is the Director of the MIT IBM Watson AI Lab, which is part of IBM Research. Before that he spent 11 years teaching at Harvard, interestingly in the Life Sciences. He holds an AB degree from Harvard in Biology and Psychology, and he holds a PhD in Neuroscience from MIT. Welcome to the show David!

David Cox: Thanks. It’s a great pleasure to be here.

I always like to start with my Rorschach question which is, “What is intelligence and why is Artificial Intelligence artificial?” And you’re a neuroscientist and a psychologist and a biologist, so how do you think of intelligence?

That’s a great question. I think we don’t necessarily need to have just one definition. I think people get hung up on the words, but at the end of the day, what makes us intelligent, what makes other organisms on this planet intelligent is the ability to absorb information about the environment, to build models of what’s going to happen next, to predict and then to make actions that help achieve whatever goal you’re trying to achieve. And when you look at it that way that’s a pretty broad definition. ...."