Will Deep Convolutional Neural Networks open the way to Artificial General Intelligence?

Artificial Intelligence, and its diverse subfields, including machine learning, has been the subject of intense study for more than half a century. Recent advances in machine learning, jointly known as deep learning, have partially closed the gap that exists between the abilities of naturally intelligent systems (i.e., brains) and artificially intelligent ones in problems related with perception. Additionally, some problems that have been deemed very hard to solve, like learning to play the game of Go from scratch, have fallen to approaches that combine deep reinforcement learning with efficient computation methods. However, the depth of understanding of these systems is still very limited, and many counterexamples exist that show that DCNNs (deep convolutional neural networks) are still very far from approaching human abilities even in simple perception problems. In this seminar, I will lead an interactive discussion about the power and limitations of DCNNs and whether this technology will lead the way to artificial general intelligence or will simply become one more tool in the practitioners toolbox. Active involvement from the audience will be expected.