[music] The usual list of great problems in
science is the origin of the universe.., the structure of time and matter... the origin of life... But here we are after, "What is intelligence?" How the brain creates the mind. "What is consciousness? You know that's deeper than everything
else because after all is with our mind that we try to solve all other problems. [music] I think intelligence is the ability to make connections between concepts and objects. And some of these concept can be very abstract, and then we get into a higher level of intelligence. [music] It's a question that people have
wondered about since they wondered about anything. From the ancient Greeks through
everything that we call thinking. It pretty much always starts with,
"How do we acquire knowledge?" What is knowledge? Right? These are the questions that Plato
and Aristotle talked about, and Hugh, DesCarte, Kant, and every child, and every parent thinks about these things. Every machine we use today has a body and a brain. The brain is the set of algorithms that gets the body to do what it is meant to do. When you take a body and the brain and you put them together, you end up with a machine that can do something extraordinary. [music] there is a huge debate about whether we
are going through an age of total transformation of work in which people will lose their jobs to machines or whether this is a continuation of a two hundred-year trend where we're going to have productivity growth coupled with wage
and employment growth. [Josh Tenenbaum] Machine forms of intelligence are more and more a part of our lives, our economies, all of our experiences, our cultures. So we'd like those machines to be good. We'd like them to be smart so that we can teach them,
get them to learn the way a child does. But we'd also like them to be good in
the sense we like be able to trust them, to be able to talk to them, to build a
shared understanding so that they can be real partners for humans. [music and children giggling] [Daniela Rus] For many years scientists and engineers
have aspired to have a stronger connection between living systems and
engineered machines. They have used living systems as inspiration for what might be possible in the future with machines. [music] [Robot talking] And by studying machines they have
aspired to create hypotheses and models that might explain the mysteries behind
living systems. [Dina Katabi] And now machines can feel, can feel your emotions probably more than I can feel it because they can tap into your breathing, your heart rate, and analyze it using these the algorithms. [music] [Daron Acemoglu] Technology has its own mind. But many things influences it. It's really about whether we're going to be able to use these technologies productively. [music and background talking] [Tomaso Poggio] Maybe what we really want is for ourselves to become more intelligent. And in order to do that we have to
understand what is our intelligence, how to expand it. [Josh Tenenbaum] This is a period that started with the rise of all of the fields that we work in: cognitive science, neuroscience, artificial intelligence. And it's only now though that they're mature enough, that each one of them is able to start to deliver its promises, and that they can all talk to each other and really start to make progress together
on the science and engineering of intelligence. [music]
