Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have attended on many occasions top AI conferences and have spoken to more researchers than I care or could count. I can tell you there is a very little interest in "intelligent machines"[1]. Rather, everyone I have ever met works on different types of problem solving techniques. What constitutes a "problem" and what makes a successful "technique" differ wildly. Taking a step back however and analysing the field as…
I would expect to get this kind of impression from an average researcher, because that's what average researchers do (even at AI conferences). What do the top researchers think? Google paid 10M per head for DeepMind guys, explicitly working on AGI. Top researchers at FB works on specifing "Artificial tasks for artificial intelligence" ( http://www.iclr.cc/doku.php?id=iclr2015:main#antoine_bordes ), basically a better…
Not even out of the gate and already reaching for an ad-hominem. You must be fun at parties.
> What do the top researchers think?
The same thing. Except when they're in front of a camera. Then they get all stupid and start talking about machines being on the cusp of taking over. This phenomenon can be observed all the way back to the origins of AI. After the interview is over these same researchers go back into the lab and are once again searching and sorting.
> There is a lot of work on combining graphical models with logic, for example Pedro Domingos' work, the goal is clearly machine reasoning.
I feel there is a difference between automated reasoning and intelligence. All current AI is just machines imbued with human insight and (often, especially in the most effective cases) domain-specific knowledge. These efforts manifest as search and sort techniques that allow said machines to analyse facts and propagate information in order to select from myriad possible actions. There is no intelligence here except that which we provide. It's all smoke and mirrors. We don't even know what intelligence is; how can we aspire to replicate it? AI researchers are, by-and-large, just Computer Scientists. Not biologists, not psychologists; just guys and gals working with ever more elaborate Turing Machines. The algorithms they come up with are without exception dumb dumb dumb.
> Google paid 10M per head for DeepMind guys, explicitly working on AGI
Please. DeepMind is just a startup based on (among other things) David Silver's work into reinforcement learning. Google is not interested in these guys because they want intelligent machines; they just want automatons to better sift through reams of data in order to make recommendations and better sell you crap you do not need.