Professor Melanie Mitchell gives the Margaret Boden Lecture for 2023 at the University of Cambridge. The Margaret Boden lectures are held annually by the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at Cambridge.
Abstract: While AI has made dramatic progress over the last decade in areas such as vision, language processing, and robotics, current AI systems still lack key aspects of human intelligence. In this lecture Professor Melanie Mitchell argues that the inability to form conceptual abstractions—and to make abstraction-driven analogies—is a primary source of brittleness and unreliability in state-of-the-art AI systems. She reflects on the role played by abstraction at all levels of intelligence, and on the prospects for developing AI systems with humanlike abilities for abstract reasoning and analogy.
