Ingmar Posner talk, DAY 2 EI'23 Conference

Ingmar Posner: Robots Thinking Fast and Slow
Abstract: Recent progress in AI technology has been breathtaking. However, many of the advances have played to the strengths of virtual environments: infinite training data is available, risk-free exploration is possible, acting is essentially free. In contrast, we require our robots to robustly operate in real-time, to learn from a limited amount of data, take mission- and sometimes safety-critical decisions and increasingly even display a knack for creative problem solving. To bridge this gap, we can adopt an alternative view of recent advances in AI. For the first time, roboticists can draw meaningful functional parallels between AI technology and components identified in the cognitive sciences as pivotal to robust operation in the real world: Dual Process Theory and metacognition. In this talk I will contextualise this notion against recent work in robot learning to establish the building blocks of a Dual Process Theory for robots.