Speakers: Peter Bock, Professor Emeritus of Engineering, Department of Computer Science, George Washington University, Paul Cohen, Program Manager, Information Innovation Office, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency; Professor and Founding Director, School of Information: Science, Technology, and Arts, University of Arizona, and Andrew McAfee, Principal Research Scientist and Cofounder, Initiative on the Digital Economy, Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Presider: Amy Alving, Member, Board of Directors, Fannie Mae; Former Chief Technology Officer, Science Applications International Corporation October 2, 2014, Washington, DC Council on Foreign Relations

ALVING: Good afternoon and welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations' discussion on the future of artificial intelligence, robots and beyond. I'm May Alving, and I'll be your moderator for today. We have a very distinguished panel here, and in your information, you have a detailed bio on everybody on the stage, so we won't go into those specifics.

But briefly, let me introduce Professor Peter Bock, emeritus from George Washington University, who has decades of experience in building and developing artificial intelligence systems. Next to me we have Paul Cohen, also an academic from the University of Arizona, who is now at my alma mater, DARPA, working for the Defense Department's most advanced research and development organization. And we also have Andy McAfee from MIT, who comes to this from a business and economic background with long experience looking at the impact of artificial intelligence from an economics perspective.

So we'll start today with 30 minutes of moderated discussion amongst the panelists, and then we'll turn it over to the audience for Q&A.

I think in this area, it's important to make sure that we have some common understanding of what we're talking about when we say artificial intelligence. And so I'll ask Peter to start off by describing to us, what is artificial intelligence more than just smart software?

BOCK: Yeah, in my TED talk, I described people who come up to me and say that AI is really the field that tries to solve very, very, very hard problems, and I always found that definition a bit smarmy, because all of us here are involved in solving very, very, very hard problems. That's not it at all.

It's a general purpose problem-solving engine that has a more or less broad domain of applications so that a single solution can apply to many different situations even in different fields. That's beginning -- a beginning definition for AI, and also probably a longer definition, an engine that can eventually be broadened into beginning to imitate, shall we say, or, in fact, emulate the cognition of our own thinking patterns.

I think I'll stop there and let the rest jump in.

ALVING: OK. So, Paul, I know that from your perspective, artificial intelligence is about more than just crunching a lot of numbers. You know, the buzzword in -- out in the world today is big data, big data is going to solve all our problems. But big data isn't sufficient, is that correct?

COHEN: That's right. So do you want me to talk about what's AI or why big data isn't a sufficient?

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The Future of Artificial Intelligence: Robots and Beyond