Module 8: Strong AI, Artificial General Intelligence
Mandatory Watching - videos with quizzes - finish before 11 am, Thursday, July 16
- 8.1 — Lecture: Philosophical Issues for Artificial Intelligence, 43 minutes (May 7, 2026)
- 8.2 — Lecture: Some Opinionated Takes on “Artificial General Intelligence”, 45 minutes (May 7, 2026)
- 8.3 — Wired - Aaron Ames Answers Robot Questions, 22 minutes (April 28, 2026)
- 8.4 — Chelsea Finn Explains Moravec’s Paradox at 5 Levels of Difficulty, 19 minutes (Sept. 19, 2022)
- 8.5 — Emergent Garden - The Chaos of AI Agents, 15 minutes (July 26, 2025)
Written assignment - finish by end of Thursday, July 16, give feedback by meeting on Tuesday, July 21
8. Plan/outline/draft Final Presentation
Make some plans for your final project, and make an attempt at one creative part of it.
Further watching/reading
- Robots
- Marques Brownlee - The Problem with this Humanoid Robot
- Joanna Stern - I Tried the First Humanoid Robot. It Got Weird. 9 minutes (Oct. 28, 2025) - the video he mentions
- Marques Brownlee - The Problem with this Humanoid Robot
- AGI (or its impossibility)
- Eddy Chen, Mikhail Belkin, Leon Bergen and David Danks, in Nature, Does AI already have human-level intelligence? The evidence is clear (Feb. 2, 2026) - paper claiming that current AI is AGI
- The OpenAI Charter
- Sparks of AGI (March 22, 2023) - the Microsoft research paper claiming ChatGPT had the beginnings of AGI
- Google/DeepMind, Taking a Responsible Path to AGI, (April 2, 2025)
- Anthropic’s purpose statement (note: no mention of AGI)
- Dario Amodei (Anthropic), Machines of Loving Grace, (October, 2024)
- Yann LeCun (ex-Meta), Mathematical Obstacles on the Way to Human Level AI, 56 minutes (March 21, 2025)
- Alan Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” (scan removed), the 1950 paper that started it all (2 hour video of me reading and explaining the paper)
- Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, AI as Normal Technology, (April 15, 2025) - a long essay about why we shouldn’t think of AI in terms of AGI or superintelligence, but “just” as something like electricity or the industrial revolution
- Universal Resiliance - Science Proves AGI is a Myth, 10 minutes (August 20, 2025) - over-hyped title, but makes the point well, about the conflict between generality and specificity
- Voxel51, The Road to Useful Robotics, 30 minutes (Sept. 14, 2025) - lots of details about how far robots have come and how far they have left to go
- Business Insider, Why Fully Self-Driving Cars Are Almost Impossible, 40 minutes (March 21, 2026) - overly grandiose title, but has useful points to consider about the difficulty of getting from current Waymos to a fully self-driving city
- AI companions
- Kate Cassidy, How AI is Manipulating Your Mind with Flattery, 18 minutes (Aug. 11, 2025)
- Angela Chenn, The Rise of Chatbot “Friends”, including philosophers discussing what friendship means, in Vox
- Emily Chang, AI Companions Always Say Yes, But There’s a Catch, 25 minutes (Nov. 18, 2024), at Bloomberg Originals
- Emily Chang, What Happens When Robots Don’t Need Us Any More?, 25 minutes (Nov. 11, 2024), at Bloomberg Originals
- Moravec’s Paradox
- Brian Potter, Robot Dexterity Still Seems Hard (April 24, 2025), an investigation of why robot hands and fingers are still so much worse than human hands and fingers
- Rodney Brooks, Why Today’s Humanoid Robots Won’t Learn Dexterity (Sept. 26, 2025) - a famous roboticist explains the source of many limits on current robots
- Ken Goldberg, Why robots are so much less advanced than other AI, 12 minutes (March 8, 2024) TED talk on Moravec’s Paradox
- Celia Ford, “The Most Promising Way to Understand how AI Works is by Understanding the Brain”, (July 26, 2024) in Vox
- Yoshua Bengio and Vincent Conitzer - What do LLMs tell us about ourselves?, (July 8, 2024)
- Physical Intelligence (PI zero) - Our First Generalist Policy, (Oct. 31, 2024) a demonstration of a robot that can fold items of clothing and do a few other physical tasks
- Robotics: Why Now?, 18 minutes (July 26, 2025) - two of their engineers explaining recent progress
- Kurzgesagt, AI - Humanity’s Final Invention, 18 minutes (Aug. 6, 2024) video tying together many class themes
- Lex Fridman and Sean Carroll on AGI, 14 minutes (April 22, 2024) excerpts from a podcast (full podcast, 2.5 hours long)
- exurb1a, How Will We Know When AI Is Conscious?, 22 minutes (Aug. 20, 2023)