Naive Physics Revisited
                                  Murray Shanahan
                                Imperial College London


Abstract
Pat Hayess nave physics papers were highly influential in the 1980s and 90s, inaugurating
the field of qualitative reasoning, inspiring the CYC project, and laying the foundations of
the semantic web. Back then, the underlying motive for studying common sense physics
was the development of human-level AI. But this grandiose aim slowly faded into the
background of mainstream AI research, and has only recently been revived, under the new
moniker of artificial general intelligence (AGI). Nowadays, AGI is being pursued through
the methodology of neural networks, an approach that was anathama to the logic-oriented
common sense reasoning community that arose in the 1980s. In this talk I will examine
the importance of common sense physics for contemporary AGI research, highlighting a
number of insights from AIs past that are still relevant today.


Biographical Sketch
Murray Shanahan is Professor of Cognitive at Imperial College London and a Senior Re-
search Scientist at DeepMind. He works on artificial intelligence, neurodynamics, and
philosophy of mind. Educated at Imperial College and Cambridge University (Kings Col-
lege), he became a full professor at Imperial in 2006, and joined DeepMind in 2017. He was
scientific advisor to the film Ex Machina, and regularly appears in the media to comment
on artificial intelligence and robotics. As well as many scientific papers he has published
several books, including Embodiment and the Inner Life (Oxford University Press, 2010)
and The Technological Singularity (MIT Press, 2015).