A.I. - Connecting the dots - Keynote lecture by Pascal Kaufmann

The State of Artificial Intelligence in a Nutshell
www.reatch.ch/ai
In connection with the reatch series of events "A.I.: Connecting the Dots" on 28/29 September 2017 at ETH Zurich, Pascal Kaufmann, founder of Starmind will give a keynote lecture on: The State of Artificial Intelligence in a Nutshell - On the Symbosis of Man and Machine.
Kaufmann, a technology entrepreneur, pushes the limits of the unknown. Obsessed with robots, cyborgs, artificial intelligence and brain research, this ETH neuroscience graduate researched the interface between living brains and robots at medical school in the U.S. where he formulated his vision “to think with the power of 1’000 brains” opening a new field called “Brain Technology.”
More information about the key note address and the A.I. exhibit on our event page and on Facebook - let your friends know!
THIS EVENT IS FULLY BOOKED - However, access to the A.I. exhibit is possible without restrictions on the 28th and 29th of September and there are still places available for the key note talks on Friday evening 29th of September.
With the kind support of the cogitofoundation and ETH Global

[@JoshuaAugustusBacigalupi]

Enjoyed the talk, especially the healthy skepticism regarding hype and the lack of real progress over decades. Given that stance, I suggest that getting a bunch of bright young students from academia is exactly the wrong approach to discover a breakthrough. They are from the status quo paradigm, the same paradigm that stokes the hype and only gave you a few more hidden layers with decades of research.
Instead, consider older independent researchers that have experienced many diverse careers that you have not preconceived to be relevant to the Promethean outcome you seek. Create a welcoming forum explicitly for these independent and diverse researchers to *truly* expand the ecosystem of ideas. To be invited to this forum, I suggest that applicants need to address key - and, as you noted, as yet unanswered and unexplored - questions like STDP, the binding problem and "competence" (i.e. generalizability). Also, they need to have a reasonably cohesive and comprehensive proposal that creates a mutually supportive framework among these high-level yet to be tackled questions.
This resource of independent thought is now invisible around the world like a vein of rare metal in the earth. It is exactly because the actual "answer" is, per your own skepticism, unorthodox that these people are individuals scattered around the world un-associated with any orthodox institutions or industries. Nevertheless, as you intuit, a forum friendly to these diverse perspectives, if brought together under one roof is much more likely to be the fertile soil for progress you seek.