Society (government, politics, education, law enforcement...), commerce, environment, science/STEM, medicine, entertainment, communication, agriculture, manufacturing... (EVERYTHING) - DATA is an integral part!

In this course, you learned principles: of data organization, usage, applications.

The focus of the course: practical aspects of creating, storing, querying, using... data.

The vast 'tech' infrastructure: processing (cloud, GPUs...), storing (cloud...), communications (the Web, handhelds...) all are [seem] tailor-made for handling DATA!

It's worth reflecting on what 'data' means, now that we have dealt with it so much: we humans tend to measure, categorize, and quantify our world:

• in a table, these would be columns; in a type/class definition, these would be fields/members
• the VALUE for such columns/fields/members is what 'data' is!
• create KEYS, then POPULATE THEM WITH VALUES (ie. DATA)!

'Extras' has a lot of useful, practical, current items!

Disclaimer: ALL ideas in here are mine...

My claim: ALL (100%) of today's AI (including all (100%) of ML), is 'fake' - does not model natural intelligence at all!

Language is not about words.

Images are not about pixels.

The world has structure, phenomena, behaviors, cause-and-effect... WE (ANIMALS) LEARN THESE, THROUGH CONTINUING EXPERIENCE!!

My take:

• brain structure MATTERS!
• embodiment MATTERS! Embodied cognition is how nature does it
• situatedness MATTERS! The brain is in a body that lives in the world (in an environment). For prototyping purposes, VR provides a controllable environment for safe, modifiable, repeatable explorations...
• memory STRUCTURE matters - how things are coded, retrieved...
• continuous, 24x7x365 experiencing - record EVERYTHING
• WE develop hunches/heuristics - from experience!
• we can learn a LOT (on building AGI) - get clues from babies, children, animals!
• an inner 'copy' of the world, manipulatable
• a richly connected 'graph'
• emotions
• attention
• consciousness, thoughts, feelings, self, free will...
• can result in authentic creativity, incl art etc
• develop a comprehensive cognitive architecture
• testable items (on an AGI architecture) - conscience/morality/empathy, disorders, diseases, language, learning modes...
• SDCs, robots... ALWAYS 2nd class - NO INTRINSIC MOTIVATION
• summary: experience (v) -> ?? -> ?? -> ?? -> experience (n), and '4E' (embodiment, embeddedness, extendedness, enactivism)

My proposal:

• is PROPERLY embodied (with matching body/brain architectures, NOT necessarily 'anthropomorphic'), and is virtual ("for now")
• has brain structure and functions modeled after ours
• can interact, explore, learn and grow
• starts out with hardwired basic behaviors
• has an attention mechanism
• is capable of emotions in addition to thoughts

Intelligence is not merely, achieving goals, problem solving, planning, reasoning, maximizing rewards (note that these are all 'computational'!)... My two-word definition encompassing ALL forms of intelligence (and the computational aspects just mentioned): considered response.

If you want to delve further, here is my talk, for CVRCOE.

Ride the subway - back and forth, up and down town, round and round... never get off (NEVER STOP LEARNING)!!

Or, to use another metaphor:

D•A•T•A
!!!!