Gary Marcus

Gary F. Marcus (born February 8, 1970) is a professor emeritus of psychology and neural science at New York University. In 2014 he founded Geometric Intelligence, a machine-learning company later acquired by Uber. Marcus's books include '' Guitar Zero,'' which appeared on the ''New York Times'' Best Seller list, and '' Kluge,'' which was a ''New York Times'' Editors' Choice.

Marcus challenges connectionist theories which rely on random connections and argues instead that neurons can be put together into circuits that do things such as process rules or process structured representations. He hypothesizes that a small number of genes account for the functioning of the intricate human brain.

He criticizes the use of massive amounts of data to build artificial intelligence systems, arguing: "If we are to build artificial general intelligence, we are going to need to learn something from humans, how they reason and understand the physical world, and how they represent and acquire language and complex concepts."

Biography

After dropping out of high school, Marcus entered Hampshire College in 1986, where he majored in cognitive science. He continued on to graduate school at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where his advisor was the experimental psychologist Steven Pinker. Marcus received his Ph.D. in 1993, with his doctoral research focusing on negative evidence in language acquisition and regularization (and overregularization) in children's acquisition of grammatical morphology.

Theories of language and mind

Marcus's research and theories focus on the intersection between biology and psychology: How do the brain and mind relate when it comes to understanding language? He takes an innatist stance in this debate and with his psychological evidence gives many answers to open questions such as: "If there is something built in at birth, how does it get there?"

He challenges connectionist theories which posit that the mind is made up only of randomly arranged neurons. He argues that neurons can be put together to build circuits in order to do things such as process rules or process structured representations.

Research and written work

Marcus's early work focused on why children produce overregularizations, such as "breaked" and "goed", as a test case for the nature of mental rules.

In his first book, ''The Algebraic Mind'' (2001), Marcus challenged the idea that the mind might consist of largely undifferentiated neural networks. He argued that understanding the mind would require integrating connectionism with classical ideas about symbol-manipulation.

In his second book, ''The Birth of the Mind'' (2004), Marcus gives a more detailed explanation of the genetic support systems of human thought. He discusses how a small number of genes account for the intricate human brain, common false impressions of genes, and the problems they may cause for the future of genetic engineering.

Marcus's book, '' Guitar Zero'' (2012), explores the process of taking up a musical instrument as an adult.

Marcus edited ''The Norton Psychology Reader'' (2005), including selections by cognitive scientists on modern science of the human mind. With Jeremy Freeman he co-edited ''The Future of the Brain: Essays by the World's Leading Neuroscientists'' (2014), including essays by Nobel Laureates May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser.

As of May 2022, Marcus writes a newsletter giving his perspective on artificial intelligence research. In his first article, he criticized the use of massive amounts of data to build AI systems, and argued: "If we are to build AGI, we are going to need to learn something from humans, how they reason and understand the physical world, and how they represent and acquire language and complex concepts."

Representative publications

Books / Monographs

*Marcus, G.; Davis, E. (2019). ''Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust''. Pantheon/Random House.
*Marcus, G.; Freeman, J. (ed.) (2014). ''The Future of the Brain: Essays by the World's Leading Neuroscientists''. Princeton University Press.
*Marcus, G. F. (2012). ''Guitar Zero: The New Musician and the Science of Learning''. The Penguin Press.
*Marcus, G. F. (2008). ''Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind''. Houghton Mifflin.
*Marcus, G. F. (ed.) (2006). ''The Norton Psychology Reader.'' W. W. Norton.
*Marcus, G. F. (2004). ''The Birth of The Mind: How a Tiny Number of Genes Creates the Complexities of Human Thought.'' Basic Books.
*Marcus, G. F. (2001). ''The Algebraic Mind: Integrating Connectionism and Cognitive Science.'' MIT Press.
*Marcus, G. F., Pinker, S., Ullman, M., Hollander, M., Rosen, T. J., Xu, F., & Clahsen, H. (1992). Overregularization in language acquisition. ''Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 57''(4), i-178.

Peer-reviewed scientific articles

*Marcus, G. F., & Davis, E. (2013). How robust are probabilistic models of higher-level cognition? ''Psychological Science'', ''24''(12), 2351–2360.
*Marcus, G. F., Fernandes, K. J., & Johnson, S. P. (2007). Infant rule learning facilitated by speech. ''Psychological Science'', ''18''(5), 387–391.
*Marcus, G. F. (2006). Cognitive architecture and descent with modification. ''Cognition'', ''101''(2), 443–465.
*Marcus, G. F., & Fisher, S. E. (2003). FOXP2 in focus: what can genes tell us about speech and language? ''Trends in Cognitive Sciences'', ''7''(6), 257–262.
*Marcus, G. F., Vijayan, S., Bandi Rao, S., & Vishton, P. M. (1999). Rule learning by seven-month-old infants. ''Science'', ''283''(5398), 77–80.
*Marcus, G. F. (1998). Rethinking eliminative connectionism. ''Cognitive Psychology'', ''37''(3), 243–282.
*Marcus, G. F., Brinkmann, U., Clahsen, H., Wiese, R., & Pinker, S. (1995). German inflection: The exception that proves the rule. ''Cognitive Psychology'', ''29''(3), 189–256.

Articles

* Marcus, Gary, "Am I Human?: Researchers need new ways to distinguish artificial intelligence from the natural kind", ''Scientific American'', vol. 316, no. 3 (March 2017), pp. 58–63.
* Marcus, Gary, "Artificial Confidence: Even the newest, buzziest systems of artificial general intelligence are stymied by the same old problems", ''Scientific American'', vol. 327, no. 4 (October 2022), pp. 42–45

References

External links

Video - discussion with Marcus and Eric Schoenberg
on Bloggingheads.tv
Video (and audio) of science interview/discussion with Marcus
and Carl Zimmer on Bloggingheads.tv
Video - from Authors@Google series featuring Gary Marcus

{{DEFAULTSORT:Marcus, Gary
Living people
1970 births
21st-century American psychologists
American cognitive scientists
Psycholinguistics
New York University faculty
Hampshire College alumni
Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni
Artificial intelligence