Various web links I found to be of interest recently (although a couple are older).
Sandra Blakeslee. The New York Times, August 2, 2005
Dr. Anna Berti sits facing a patient whose paralyzed left arm rests
in her lap next to her good right arm.
"Can you raise your left arm?" Dr. Berti asks.
"Yes," the patient says.
The arm remains motionless. Dr. Berti tries again. "Are you raising
your left arm?" she asks.
"Yes," the patient says. But the arm still does not move.
Dr. Berti, a neuroscientist at University of Turin in Italy, has
had many such conversations with stroke patients who suffer from
denial syndrome, a strange disorder in which paralyzed patients
vehemently insist that they are not paralyzed.
This denial, Dr. Berti said, was long thought to be purely a
psychological problem. "It was a reaction to a stroke: I am
paralyzed, it is so horrible, I will deny it," she said.
But in a new study, Dr. Berti and her colleagues have shown that
denial is not a problem of the mind. Rather, it is a neurological
condition that occurs when specific brain regions are knocked out
by a stroke.
Patients deny the paralysis because a closely related region of the
brain that is still intact appears to tell them that their bodies
are responding normally.
All Things Considered. May 19, 2015
In other words, years of work from dedicated, smart researchers have produced a towel-folding robot that can't keep up with an average 8-year-old. This problem, Abbeel says, is not limited to towels.
Interview with Gary Marcus
Marcus, who earned his Ph.D. in brain and cognitive sciences from
MIT and is now a professor emeritus at New York University, says
the field of AI has been over-reliant on deep learning, which he
believes has inherent limitations. We'll get further, he says, by
using not only deep learning but also more traditional symbol-based
approaches to AI, in which computers encode human knowledge through
symbolic representations (which in fact was the dominant approach
during the early decades of AI research).
...
Just as GPT-3 doesn't really understand language, merely memorizing
a lot of traffic situations that you've seen doesn't convey
what you really need to understand about the world in order to drive
well. And so, what people have been trying to do is to collect more
and more data. But they're only making small incremental progress
doing that. And as you say, there aren't fleets of self-driving
taxis in Toronto, and there certainly aren't fleets in Mumbai. Most
of this work right now is done in places with good weather and
reasonably organized traffic, that's not as chaotic. The current
systems, if you put them in Mumbai, wouldn't even understand what
a rickshaw is. So they'd be in real trouble, from square one.
Also see Gary Marcus articles at Deep Learning Is Hitting a Wall and in Scientific American: Artificial General Intelligence Is Not as Imminent as You Might Think
Sabine Hossenfelder: but no one in physics dares say so
It has become common among physicists to invent new particles for
which there is no evidence, publish papers about them, write more
papers about these particles’ properties, and demand the hypothesis
be experimentally tested. Many of these tests have actually been
done, and more are being commissioned as we speak. It is wasting
time and money.
...
But I believe the biggest contributor to this trend is a misunderstanding
of Karl Popper’s philosophy of science, which, to make a long story short,
demands that a good scientific idea has to be falsifiable.
Particle physicists seem to have misconstrued this to mean
that any falsifiable idea is also good science.
According to The New York Times, 82 of Jones' 350 students signed
the petition last spring; it alleged that too many of them were
failing and that this was unacceptable. The students cited emotional
and mental health complaints to make the case that Jones ought to
make the class less difficult.
...
The article does note that the petition never called for Jones to be fired.
But the university evidently decided that the best way to resolve
the situation was to turn him loose.
In a study they published in the Journal of Zoology, the team found
12 examples of primates caught in the nose-picking act.
...
One study encouraged additional research by suggesting that the ingestion
of nasal mucus could play an important role for the immune system,
because of the immune proteins in the mucus.