I wish I'd heard of the conference, dammit!
Mr Hinton was somewhat vague and brief in his statements here, though. What do you think the crisis point is that he's reached exactly? (It must be sure enough for the man who introduced the paradigm in the first place to have caught on, yet the change of thought process unclear enough for him to recognize that it will be somebody newer who will have to introduce something else)
This may be where my limited knowledge is my handicap, but I didn't think you would need an AGI in order to achieve unsupervised learning. There would still be an input and an output as there is now -- but instead of massive datasets used in training the models could simple experience the problem in real time, adjusting and learning based upon new results. Of course unsupervised learning models could contribute greatly to the pursuit of AGI, but I didn't think AGI predicate unsupervised learning models (which is what I am taking from the article -- or more like article abstract -- here).
Word2vec, a variant of which is Transform, Google's new machine translation framework which beats the pants off every other approach, to name one. The system it is replacing is also unsupervised.
Unfortunately while I think many of Kuhn's observations are interesting, I'm confused what you think scientists might learn from them. After all, the work in question is science, not philosophy of science, and frankly it seems a lot of time like the latter gets in the way of work (see: Popper's radical empiricism). Poetic? Sure. Useful? Difficult to see how.... Mostly his work seems useful for bolstering the credibility of speculative Popular Science articles (or Axios in this case).
My admiration for Hinton there lay separate from my remark about Kuhn.
I'm not quite sure where you got that I think scientists must learn from Kuhn's observations. But I will say, that while it's kept me away from my other studies (for the obvious displacement of reading one thing and not the other), I don't see the harm in indulging in such reflection. But my background isn't engineering, mathematics, or physical sciences before my more recent work. It's in humanities and the arts where multidisciplinary studies are encouraged. I suppose I'll probably always carry that with me. If nothing else, perspective is a good thing to have -- and not all thoughts, reflections, or ideas entertained need be engaged.
At any rate, the book was recommended and I try to remain open minded.
Funny you should say that. I take Kuhn's whole point to be that science is far messier than the empiricists acknowledge. What is the complication that you think Kuhn overlooks?