Artificial intelligence pioneer says we need to start over

That each was over-hyped I can buy. I'm less convinced of the latter part of that statement. Take ANN's. You would have thought that they had hit their ceiling at one time as well, but eventually the confluence of more compute power, more data, and better algorithms resulted in the recent resurgence. I don't see any reason to think that some of the other existing AI techniques might not also experience an explosion in utility, if combined with massive increases in compute power, more data, and better algorithms as well.

The mindset that I feel is lacking in the ML/AI community is that we should be creating systems that can be augmented and improved using AI, the product itself should stand alone without using any AI at all. This is similar to how JIT compilation can improve the machine code as the program runs. Part of how our own brains work is that the cerebral cortex doesn't really have any direct control over the body at all, it can only watch and identify patterns and project intentions to the the rest of the brain/body. This is a passive structure initially, it observes both the environment and how the lower structure interact with that environment. Only after it's observed and learned the "commands" can it begin to influence how the body moves around and interacts with the world. You could look at the CLI terminal as an example, on it's own I can interact and use it perfectly fine. But lets say I added some patterning matching and prediction AI that could make really good suggestions about what command I will type next, at some point you could promote these suggestions so that they always execute when the AI predicts you would use it. This is exactly how the brain works.

Most of my ideas of applied AI revolve around improving our HID interfaces to computers themselves. For example, I'd like to reduce our chances of developing RSI related to keyboard/mouse/trackpad usage and I feel that chorded keyboards are more ergonomic. But chorded keyboards are slower to use and harder to learn. The mapping of the chords is where I plan to apply some AI, initially I'm going to randomize how chords are bound to character inputs, these random values will use many fingers to input 1 character. As the user learns and uses the chords to input characters the AI can identify common patterns and promote those patterns into chords that use less and less fingers to input, thus improving the input speed potential of the user. The next place to use AI in this project would be autocorrection and using the user's input context(program, filetype, time, surrounding text) to continue improving these bindings and making completion suggestions.

Evolutionary algorithms have been around for a while but haven't really taken off. Maybe the problem is that you can't get from zero to intelligence with a single fitness function.

Think about it: the "fitness function" for our single-called ancestors was not how well they could thrive in a post-industrial service economy. Nor was it how well they could thrive as hunter-gatherers in the African Savannah. It was a very, very different fitness function.

To get from zero to humans, nature had to evolve single-called organisms, then mitochondria, then basic multi-celled organisms, then animals that lived in the ocean, then amphibious ones, then land-dwelling ones, then mammals, then apes, then early humans, then modern humans.

By the way, I left out the overwhelming majority of the steps.

At each step, the evolutionary pressures on these organisms were wildly different. Each set of pressures was necessary in order for the next layer of complexity to evolve.

I think that if we want to evolve an intelligent entity, we would probably have to do it like this.

Although I do tend to think that given enough time (some millions of years), other intelligence will evolve on earth, from parrots or elephants or dolphins or octipuses or something. Though there's no evidence of a brain growth spurt that led to us, in other species; and it's not settled why we had it.

Point is that you're going to end up with a massive ecosystem of organisms if you could fully simulate an evolutionary history. It's not even clear that human level intelligence would evolve. It's only happened once in our planet's history. We might be flukes.

You might have to run the massive simulation a thousand times and somehow be able to pinpoint the human-level intelligence when it does succeed.