Gary Marcus

Last updated
Gary Marcus
Gary Marcus at Web Summit 2022.jpeg
Marcus in 2022
Born
Gary Fred Marcus

(1970-02-08) February 8, 1970 (age 54)
Education Center for Talented Youth
Alma mater Hampshire College (BS)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MS, PhD)
Scientific career
Fields Cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence
Institutions New York University
Thesis On rules and exceptions : an investigation of inflectional morphology  (1993)
Doctoral advisor Steven Pinker
Website garymarcus.com

Gary Fred Marcus (born 8 February 1970) is an American psychologist, cognitive scientist, and author, known for his research on the intersection of cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence (AI). [1] [2]

Contents

Marcus is professor emeritus of psychology and neural science at New York University. In 2014 he founded Geometric Intelligence, a machine learning company later acquired by Uber. [3] [4]

His books include Guitar Zero [5] and Kluge . [6]

Early life

Marcus was born into a Jewish family in Baltimore, Maryland. He developed an early fascination with artificial intelligence and began coding at a young age. [7]

Marcus majored in cognitive science at Hampshire College. [8] He continued on to graduate school at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he conducted research on negative evidence in language acquisition [9] and regularization (and over-regularization) in children's acquisition of grammatical morphology. [10]

During his PhD studies, he was mentored by Steven Pinker. [11]

Career

In 2015 Marcus co-founded a machine-learning startup, Geometric Intelligence. When Geometric Intelligence was acquired by Uber in December 2016, he became the director of Uber's AI efforts, but left the company in March 2017. [12] [13]

In 2019 Marcus launched the startup, Robust.AI, with Rodney Brooks, iRobot co-founder and co-inventor of the Roomba. Robust.AI aims to build an "off-the-shelf" machine-learning platform for adoption in autonomous robots, similar to the way video-game engines can be adopted by third-party game developers. [14] [11]

Research

Marcus's early work focused on why children produce over-regularizations, such as "breaked" and "goed", as a test case for the nature of mental rules. [15]

In his first book, The Algebraic Mind (2001), Marcus challenged the idea that the mind might consist of largely undifferentiated neural networks. He argued that understanding the mind would require integrating connectionism with classical ideas about symbol-manipulation. [16]

Marcus's book, Guitar Zero (2012), explores the process of taking up a musical instrument as an adult.

Marcus edited The Norton Psychology Reader (2005), including selections by cognitive scientists on modern science of the human mind.

With Jeremy Freeman he co-edited The Future of the Brain: Essays by the World's Leading Neuroscientists (2014).

Language and mind

Marcus belongs to the school of thought of psychological nativism. One of his books, The Birth of the Mind (2004), describes from a nativist perspective the ways that genes can influence cognitive development, and aims to reconcile nativism with common anti-nativist arguments advanced by other academics. He discusses how a small number of genes account for the intricate human brain, common false impressions of genes, and the problems they[ clarification needed ] may cause for the future of genetic engineering. [17]

In a review, Mameli and Papineau argue that the theory expounded in the book is "more sophisticated than any version of nativism on the market", but that in attempting to rebut anti-nativist arguments, Marcus "ends up reconfiguring the nativist position out of existence", prompting Mameli and Papineau to conclude that the nativist-anti-nativist framing should "be abandoned". [18]

Artificial intelligence

Marcus is a notable critic of the "hype" surrounding artificial intelligence. [11] He has called for regulation of AI, increased AI literacy among the public, and "well-funded public thinktanks" to consider potential AI risks. [19] [20] He has also argued that AI is currently being deployed prematurely, particularly in situations that involve a risk of real-world harm resulting from bias, as with facial recognition or résumé parsing, since current deep-learning techniques are not amenable to formal verification for correctness. [21]

Marcus has described current large language models as "approximations to [...] language use rather than language understanding". [11]

On 29 March 2023, Marcus and other researchers signed an open letter calling for a 6-month moratorium on "the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4" until proper safeguards can be implemented, [22] [23] primarily citing the short-term risks of "mediocre AI that is unreliable [...] but widely deployed". [24] In 2024 he rushed into press his latest book urging public action to regulate generative AI. [25]

Partial bibliography

Books

Articles

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cognitive science</span> Interdisciplinary scientific study of cognitive processes

Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary, scientific study of the mind and its processes. It examines the nature, the tasks, and the functions of cognition. Mental faculties of concern to cognitive scientists include language, perception, memory, attention, reasoning, and emotion; to understand these faculties, cognitive scientists borrow from fields such as linguistics, psychology, artificial intelligence, philosophy, neuroscience, and anthropology. The typical analysis of cognitive science spans many levels of organization, from learning and decision to logic and planning; from neural circuitry to modular brain organization. One of the fundamental concepts of cognitive science is that "thinking can best be understood in terms of representational structures in the mind and computational procedures that operate on those structures."

Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of mental processes such as attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity, and reasoning. Cognitive psychology originated in the 1960s in a break from behaviorism, which held from the 1920s to 1950s that unobservable mental processes were outside the realm of empirical science. This break came as researchers in linguistics and cybernetics, as well as applied psychology, used models of mental processing to explain human behavior. Work derived from cognitive psychology was integrated into other branches of psychology and various other modern disciplines like cognitive science, linguistics, and economics. The domain of cognitive psychology overlaps with that of cognitive science, which takes a more interdisciplinary approach and includes studies of non-human subjects and artificial intelligence.

Cognitive science is the scientific study either of mind or of intelligence . Practically every formal introduction to cognitive science stresses that it is a highly interdisciplinary research area in which psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy, computer science, anthropology, and biology are its principal specialized or applied branches. Therefore, we may distinguish cognitive studies of either human or animal brains, the mind and the brain.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Connectionism</span> Cognitive science approach

Connectionism is the name of an approach to the study of human mental processes and cognition that utilizes mathematical models known as connectionist networks or artificial neural networks. Connectionism has had many "waves" since its beginnings.

In artificial intelligence, symbolic artificial intelligence is the term for the collection of all methods in artificial intelligence research that are based on high-level symbolic (human-readable) representations of problems, logic and search. Symbolic AI used tools such as logic programming, production rules, semantic nets and frames, and it developed applications such as knowledge-based systems, symbolic mathematics, automated theorem provers, ontologies, the semantic web, and automated planning and scheduling systems. The Symbolic AI paradigm led to seminal ideas in search, symbolic programming languages, agents, multi-agent systems, the semantic web, and the strengths and limitations of formal knowledge and reasoning systems.

Intelligence has been defined in many ways: the capacity for abstraction, logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving. It can be described as the ability to perceive or infer information; and to retain it as knowledge to be applied to adaptive behaviors within an environment or context.

The language of thought hypothesis (LOTH), sometimes known as thought ordered mental expression (TOME), is a view in linguistics, philosophy of mind and cognitive science, forwarded by American philosopher Jerry Fodor. It describes the nature of thought as possessing "language-like" or compositional structure. On this view, simple concepts combine in systematic ways to build thoughts. In its most basic form, the theory states that thought, like language, has syntax.

Cognitive development is a field of study in neuroscience and psychology focusing on a child's development in terms of information processing, conceptual resources, perceptual skill, language learning, and other aspects of the developed adult brain and cognitive psychology. Qualitative differences between how a child processes their waking experience and how an adult processes their waking experience are acknowledged. Cognitive development is defined as the emergence of the ability to consciously cognize, understand, and articulate their understanding in adult terms. Cognitive development is how a person perceives, thinks, and gains understanding of their world through the relations of genetic and learning factors. There are four stages to cognitive information development. They are, reasoning, intelligence, language, and memory. These stages start when the baby is about 18 months old, they play with toys, listen to their parents speak, they watch TV, anything that catches their attention helps build their cognitive development.

Developmental robotics (DevRob), sometimes called epigenetic robotics, is a scientific field which aims at studying the developmental mechanisms, architectures and constraints that allow lifelong and open-ended learning of new skills and new knowledge in embodied machines. As in human children, learning is expected to be cumulative and of progressively increasing complexity, and to result from self-exploration of the world in combination with social interaction. The typical methodological approach consists in starting from theories of human and animal development elaborated in fields such as developmental psychology, neuroscience, developmental and evolutionary biology, and linguistics, then to formalize and implement them in robots, sometimes exploring extensions or variants of them. The experimentation of those models in robots allows researchers to confront them with reality, and as a consequence, developmental robotics also provides feedback and novel hypotheses on theories of human and animal development.

A cognitive architecture refers to both a theory about the structure of the human mind and to a computational instantiation of such a theory used in the fields of artificial intelligence (AI) and computational cognitive science. These formalized models can be used to further refine comprehensive theories of cognition and serve as the frameworks for useful artificial intelligence programs. Successful cognitive architectures include ACT-R and SOAR. The research on cognitive architectures as software instantiation of cognitive theories was initiated by Allen Newell in 1990.

Computational cognition is the study of the computational basis of learning and inference by mathematical modeling, computer simulation, and behavioral experiments. In psychology, it is an approach which develops computational models based on experimental results. It seeks to understand the basis behind the human method of processing of information. Early on computational cognitive scientists sought to bring back and create a scientific form of Brentano's psychology.

In linguistics, Poverty of the stimulus (POS) arguments are arguments that children are not exposed to rich enough data within their linguistic environments to acquire every feature of their language. Poverty of the stimulus arguments are used as evidence for universal grammar, the notion that at least some aspects of linguistic competence are innate. The term "poverty of the stimulus" was coined by Noam Chomsky in 1980. Their empirical and conceptual bases are a topic of continuing debate in linguistics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Rumelhart</span> American psychologist (1942–2011)

David Everett Rumelhart was an American psychologist who made many contributions to the formal analysis of human cognition, working primarily within the frameworks of mathematical psychology, symbolic artificial intelligence, and parallel distributed processing. He also admired formal linguistic approaches to cognition, and explored the possibility of formulating a formal grammar to capture the structure of stories.

In the field of psychology, nativism is the view that certain skills or abilities are "native" or hard-wired into the brain at birth. This is in contrast to the "blank slate" or tabula rasa view, which states that the brain has inborn capabilities for learning from the environment but does not contain content such as innate beliefs. This factor contributes to the ongoing nature versus nurture dispute, one borne from the current difficulty of reverse engineering the subconscious operations of the brain, especially the human brain.

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to artificial intelligence:

Domain specificity is a theoretical position in cognitive science that argues that many aspects of cognition are supported by specialized, presumably evolutionarily specified, learning devices. The position is a close relative of modularity of mind, but is considered more general in that it does not necessarily entail all the assumptions of Fodorian modularity. Instead, it is properly described as a variant of psychological nativism. Other cognitive scientists also hold the mind to be modular, without the modules necessarily possessing the characteristics of Fodorian modularity.

In linguistics, the innateness hypothesis, also known as the nativist hypothesis, holds that humans are born with at least some knowledge of linguistic structure. On this hypothesis, language acquisition involves filling in the details of an innate blueprint rather than being an entirely inductive process. The hypothesis is one of the cornerstones of generative grammar and related approaches in linguistics. Arguments in favour include the poverty of the stimulus, the universality of language acquisition, as well as experimental studies on learning and learnability. However, these arguments have been criticized, and the hypothesis is widely rejected in other traditions such as usage-based linguistics. The term was coined by Hilary Putnam in reference to the views of Noam Chomsky.

Ron Sun is a cognitive scientist who has made significant contributions to computational psychology and other areas of cognitive science and artificial intelligence. He is currently professor of cognitive sciences at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and formerly the James C. Dowell Professor of Engineering and Professor of Computer Science at University of Missouri. He received his Ph.D. in 1992 from Brandeis University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Embodied cognition</span> Interdisciplinary theory

Embodied cognition is the concept suggesting that many features of cognition are shaped by the state and capacities of the organism. The cognitive features include a wide spectrum of cognitive functions, such as perception biases, memory recall, comprehension and high-level mental constructs and performance on various cognitive tasks. The bodily aspects involve the motor system, the perceptual system, the bodily interactions with the environment (situatedness), and the assumptions about the world built the functional structure of organism's brain and body.

References

  1. A Skeptical Take on the A.I. Revolution , retrieved 2023-01-11
  2. "Machines that think like humans: Everything to know about AGI and AI Debate 3". ZDNET. Retrieved 2023-01-11.
  3. Etherington, Darrell (2016-12-05). "Uber acquires Geometric Intelligence to create an AI lab". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2023-01-11.
  4. "Uber Bets on Artificial Intelligence With Acquisition and New Lab". The New York Times. 2016-12-05. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2018-05-20.
  5. Guitar Zero by Gary Marcus | PenguinRandomHouse.com.
  6. "Editors' Choice - Book Review". The New York Times. 2008-05-04. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2018-05-20.
  7. ""This is the teenage phase of AI. Tools with extraordinary power that are completely unreliable"". ctech. 2023-05-08. Retrieved 2023-12-19.
  8. "Gary Marcus 86F". Hampshire College. Retrieved 2023-01-11.
  9. Marcus, Gary F. (1993-01-01). "Negative evidence in language acquisition". Cognition. 46 (1): 53–85. doi:10.1016/0010-0277(93)90022-N. ISSN   0010-0277. PMID   8432090. S2CID   23458757.
  10. Marcus, Gary F. (1995). "Children's overregularization of English plurals: a quantitative analysis*". Journal of Child Language. 22 (2): 447–459. doi:10.1017/S0305000900009879. ISSN   1469-7602. PMID   8550732. S2CID   46561477.
  11. 1 2 3 4 Anadiotis, George (November 12, 2020). "What's next for AI: Gary Marcus talks about the journey toward robust artificial intelligence". ZDNet. Retrieved 2023-03-30.
  12. Bhuiyan, Johana (2017-03-08). "Uber's new head of its AI labs has stepped down from his role". Vox. Retrieved 2023-03-30.
  13. Fried, Ina (2017-03-08). "The head of Uber's AI labs is latest to leave the company". Axios. Retrieved 2023-03-30.
  14. Feldman, Amy. "Startup Founded By Cognitive Scientist Gary Marcus And Roboticist Rodney Brooks Raises $15 Million To Make Building Smarter Robots Easier". Forbes. Retrieved 2023-03-30.
  15. Marcus, G. F., Pinker, S., Ullman, M., Hollander, M., Rosen, T. J., and Xu, F. (1992). Overregularization in Language Acquisition. (Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development). 57 (4, Serial No. 228). SRCD monograph?
  16. Marcus, G.F., The Algebraic Mind: Integrating Connectionism and Cognitive Science, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2001.
  17. Marcus, G.F., The Birth of The Mind: How a Tiny Number of Genes Creates the Complexities of Human Thought, New York, Basic Books, 2004.
  18. Mameli, Matteo; Papineau, David (2006-09-01). "The new nativism: a commentary on Gary Marcus's The birth of the mind". Biology and Philosophy. 21 (4): 559–573. doi:10.1007/s10539-005-1800-7. ISSN   1572-8404. S2CID   59464488.
  19. Marcus, Gary (2022-08-07). "Siri or Skynet? How to separate AI fact from fiction". The Observer. ISSN   0029-7712 . Retrieved 2023-03-31.
  20. "The world needs an international agency for artificial intelligence, say two AI experts". The Economist. ISSN   0013-0613 . Retrieved 2023-12-22.
  21. Georges, Benoît (November 26, 2019). "" Les machines ne savent pas gérer les situations imprévues "". Les Echos (in French). Retrieved 2023-03-30.
  22. Chavanne, Yannick (March 29, 2023). "Bengio, Musk, Wozniak et des centaines d'autres experts appellent à mettre en pause le développement des IA". ICTjournal (in French). Retrieved 2023-03-30.
  23. "Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter". Future of Life Institute. Retrieved 2023-03-30.
  24. Marcus, Gary (March 28, 2023). "AI risk ≠ AGI risk". The Road to AI We Can Trust. Retrieved 2023-03-30.

Marcus, G. F. (2024). Taming Silicon Valley: How We Can Ensure That AI Works for Us. MIT Press.