Artificial Intelligence Thinks like People with Autism

We think in words, we think in pictures, we think in smells, we think in feelings. Like right now you can think about the way that you imagine like a really soft cat would feel if you’re petting it. We think in all kinds of modalities. I happened to read a book called Thinking in Pictures by Temple Grandin. Temple Grandin is a well-known person on the autism spectrum and she does a lot of amazing things with her visual thinking. She designs livestock equipment and visualizes these complicated pieces of machinery all in her mind. And what we see in some other people with autism also is that they seem to be hard over on the visual side. Can we replicate that in our Artificial Intelligence systems? And can we use our AI systems to better understand what is actually going on in a person’s mind like Temple Grandin’s? So the Raven's Progressive Matrices is a really widely used intelligence test. And the problems kind of look like geometric analogies where you would see like one circle going to two circles and then one square and you would have to figure out what that missing piece is. And we literally scanned the problems from those test booklets and feed them into our AI system and see how well AI systems can do on those same tests. Our best AI system currently does about at the level of an average sixteen or seventeen year old. We’re impressed and surprised because one of the sort of key features of that particular AI system is that it does all of its reasoning visually. There’s a lot of evidence that people actually use images and language when you’re solving these tests. Like you’ll be taking to yourself as you’re solving it, and that’s part of how what enables you to deal with the complex problems and we wanted to see how far will images alone take you using only visual thinking. We need AI systems that will sort of draw from this richness of varieties of human intelligence to be more capable, and more powerful, and more creative.

Channel: Vanderbilt University

Views: 5,912

Keywords: Vanderbilt University, artifical intelligence, ai, temple grandin, thinking in pictures, visual thinking, visual, autism, children with autism, people with autism, research

Id: BY3ETBvvQBo

Length: 1min 43sec (103 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 05 2017