From the webpage:
The MIT Intelligence Quest will advance the science and engineering of both human and machine intelligence. Launched on February 1, 2018, MIT IQ seeks to discover the foundations of human intelligence and drive the development of technological tools that can positively influence virtually every aspect of society.
The Institute’s culture of collaboration will encourage life scientists, computer scientists, social scientists, and engineers to join forces to investigate the societal implications of their work as they pursue hard problems lying beyond the current horizon of intelligence research. By uniting diverse fields and capitalizing on what they can teach each other, we seek to answer the deepest questions about intelligence.
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We are setting out to answer two big questions: How does human intelligence work, in engineering terms? And how can we use that deep grasp of human intelligence to build wiser and more useful machines, to the benefit of society?
Drawing on MIT’s deep strengths and signature values, culture, and history, MIT IQ promises to make important contributions to understanding the nature of intelligence, and to harnessing it to make a better world.
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The most refreshing aspect of the MIT Intelligence Quest page is that it ends a contact form.
That’s right, a contact form.
Unlike the ill-fated EU brain project that had pre-chosen approaches and had a roadmap for replicating a human brain. Are they still consuming funds with meetings, hotel rooms, etc.?
You know my mis-givings about creating intelligence in the absence of understanding our own.
On the other hand, mimicking how human intelligence works in bounded situations is a far more tractable problem.
Not too tractable but tractable enough to yield useful results.