Voices in AI – Episode 69: A Conversation with Raj Minhas

Author: Byron Reese / Source: Gigaom

Today’s leading minds talk AI with host Byron Reese

About this Episode

Episode 69 of Voices in AI features host Byron Reese and Dr. Raj Minhas talk about AI, AGI, and machine learning. They also delve into explainability and other quandaries AI is presenting.

Raj Minhas has a PhD and MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Toronto, with his BE from Delhi University. Raj is also the Vice President and Director of Interactive and Analytics Laboratory at PARC.

Visit www.VoicesinAI.com to listen to this one-hour podcast or read the full transcript.

Byron Reese: This is Voices in AI, brought to you by GigaOm, I’m Byron Reese. Today I’m excited that our guest is Raj Minhas, who is Vice President and the Director of Interactive and Analytics Laboratory at PARC, which we used to call Xerox PARC. Raj earned his PhD and MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Toronto, and his BE from Delhi University. He has eight patents and six patent-pending applications. Welcome to the show, Raj!

Raj Minhas: Thank you for having me.

I like to start off, just asking a really simple question, or what seems like a very simple question: what is artificial intelligence?

Okay, I’ll try to give you two answers. One is a flip response, which is if you tell me what is intelligence, I’ll tell you what is artificial intelligence, but that’s not very useful, so I’ll try to give you my functional definition.

I think of artificial intelligence as the ability to automate cognitive tasks that we humans do, so that includes the ability to process information, make decisions based on that, learn from that information, at a high level. That functional definition is useful enough for me.

Well I’ll engage on each of those, if you’ll just permit me. I think even given a definition of intelligence which everyone agreed on, which doesn’t exist, artificial is still ambiguous. Do you think of it as artificial in the sense that artificial turf really isn’t grass, so it’s not really intelligence, it just looks like intelligence? Or, is it simply artificial because we made it, but it really is intelligent?

It’s the latter. So if we can agree on what intelligence is, then artificial intelligence to me would be the classical definition of artificial intelligence, which is re-creating that outside the human body. So re-creating that by ourselves, it may not be re-created in the way it-is created in our minds, in the way…

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