
A 20-Year Community Roadmap for Artificial Intelligence Research in the US [pdf] - infodocket
https://cra.org/ccc/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/03/AI_Roadmap_Exec_Summary-FINAL-.pdf
======
Animats
_" Create and operate a National AI infrastructure" "National AI Research
Centers" "National AI Laboratories"_ It's all about getting Government money.

Ed Feigenbaum was writing stuff like that in the 1980s. He was calling for a
national AI lab, headed by him, to fight off the threat from Japan. See his
book, "The Fifth Generation".[1] This was all for "expert systems", which
didn't do much and led to the "AI Winter".

This time around, we don't need that, because machine learning already has
profitable applications. Finding applications outside adtech, Big Brother, and
finance might be useful.

Remember the "BRAIN initiative" from 2013 or so?[2] Whatever happened with
that?

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Generation-Artificial-
Intellige...](https://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Generation-Artificial-Intelligence-
Challenge/dp/0201115190)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BRAIN_Initiative](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BRAIN_Initiative)

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mattkrause
The BRAIN Initiative is still happening.

We published some stuff funded by it (via DARPA's RAM/RAM Replay programs)
earlier this month. I'm pretty sure there are other active grants and funding
programs (RFAs, etc) out there too.

The program wasn't meant to _completely_ solve the brain--that's going to take
far longer than ten years. Instead, the goal, especially of DARPA's portion,
was to give neuroscience a jumpstart and then let the promising results get
picked up by more traditional mechanisms (NIH Institutes, industry, etc).
That's worked pretty well: companies have come out of it (Nia Therapeutics was
spun off from UPENN's work on RAM), along with a slew of new data, tools, and
papers. On a very personal level, I'm working on something totally different
than I planned on, and it's going well.

~~~
thatoneuser
This is very interesting to me. What are you working on?

~~~
mattkrause
Non-invasive brain stimulation, and specifically a family of techniques called
transcranial electrical stimulation (tES). These use electrodes, placed right
on the intact scalp, to generate weak electric fields around the head. The
hope is that (some of) it passes through the skin, skull, and CSF and affects
the electrical activity of the neurons beneath.

While people have gone crazy trying this for every sort of problem (basic
science experiments, clinical conditions, performance enhancements), it's been
unclear how tES works—or, indeed, if it works at all.

The human data is a mess: some of it reports dramatic effects, others find
nothing at all, and many of the experiments are...not the best to begin with.
Animal data has mostly come from isolated tissue or rodents, which have very
different brains and heads (the mouse skull is paper-thin, for example, and
the brain is smooth, which makes it easier to get an electric field in there).

To address this, we apply tES to awake monkeys playing "video games" (boring
ones, but still). Monkey anatomy is pretty similar to humans, as is their
behavior, but we can also monitor neural activity via tiny implanted
electrodes.

To my _immense_ surprise, tES appears to have effects on both brain activity
and behavior. In our 2017 study, we used direct current and looked at effects
in areas on the brain's surface. Someone wrote a nice blog post about it here:
[https://hackaday.com/2017/11/13/shockingly-darpas-brain-
stim...](https://hackaday.com/2017/11/13/shockingly-darpas-brain-stimulator-
might-not-be-complete-nonsense/) (which also has a copy of the paper). More
recently, we managed to find some effects on individual neurons and in deep
brain areas that are often targeted for neurostimulation (twitter thread here:
[https://twitter.com/prokraustinator/status/11026751895638220...](https://twitter.com/prokraustinator/status/1102675189563822080)).

Never would have gone down this road without DARPA, but it's been fun (and
exhausting). I do like that it's got some fairly obvious clinical
applications, unlike my PhD stuff.

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basitmakine
Whenever I read a research paper like this on AI, I feel a sudden urge and
motivation to go ahead and invent AGI. It passes a moment later tho.

~~~
nkozyra
Yep, this is the same reason I nearly create cold fusion at home every few
months.

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harmful_stereo
I'm assuming some varieties of ai research will only occur as part of an arms
race, as happened with nukes. Buy maybe that's just assuming what's past is
present.

~~~
killjoywashere
The cost of the Manhatten Project wasn't in Los Alamos. It was in Oak Ridge
with the gas centrifuge operation. If I recall, the total program was 33B and
25B went to enrichment ops.

That will be AI. Whoever funds annotation and digitization will win.

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graycat
TL/DR: The message is simple: "Just send money."!

~~~
lsofzz
Ha Ha! ;_;

