I'd dispute that AI research is stuck or that his proposed answer along the lines of "An international A.I. mission focused on teaching machines to read" is a good one.
Research seems to be cracking along with AlphaGo, self driving cars and the like. Recently DeepMind have been doing interesting stuff with dreams[1], imagination[2] and body movement[3], the last one being a little reminiscent of his daughter inventing a way to exit her chair mentioned in the article.
Re government intervention it's not something like CERN where you need billions in capital and it's not an area where a big government project is likely to be the best use of capital.
There's a LOT of non-Deepmind research as well, some things that have actually been published before Deepmind.
Don't get me wrong, Deepmind puts out a lot of great work, but do look at other research labs as well, especially the ones that aren't as well known. Deepmind markets their research really well, but there's a ton of other labs doing good work as well.
Any tips on how to find the more obscure stuff? http://kurzweilai.net occasionally bubbles up really crazy stuff, but perhaps there is a journal or other curated resource you know of.
Let's just say if the terminator had the brain of a self-driving car, I could kill it with my Prius. Lots of "progress" is being made but you could still fairly call it "stuck".
If you look at inventions in tech that had huge impacts it was precisely huge government investment that made it happen. Are you denying that Chinese government investment in AI is going to pay off? Read the AI literature and you will likely find a Chinese name on the literature. This is because of government investment, not despite it.
These things take time and money. The profit motive is a killer of invention.
Research seems to be cracking along with AlphaGo, self driving cars and the like. Recently DeepMind have been doing interesting stuff with dreams[1], imagination[2] and body movement[3], the last one being a little reminiscent of his daughter inventing a way to exit her chair mentioned in the article.
Re government intervention it's not something like CERN where you need billions in capital and it's not an area where a big government project is likely to be the best use of capital.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-17/google-de... [2] http://www.wired.co.uk/article/googles-deepmind-creates-an-a... [3] https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2017/7/10/15946542/deepmind-pa...