I'd say that causality seems useful for intelligence. Josh Tenenbaum has pushed the idea of causal models and inference, and I find it compelling > Recent prog

I'd say that causality seems useful for intelligence. Josh Tenenbaum has pushed the idea of causal models and inference, and I find it compelling > Recent progress in artificial intelligence (AI) has renewed interest in building systems that learn and think like people. Many advances have come from using deep neural networks trained end-to-end in tasks such as object recognition, video games, and board games, achieving performance that equals or even beats humans in some respects. Despite their biological inspiration and performance achievements, these systems differ from human intelligence in crucial ways. > We review progress in cognitive science suggesting that truly human-like learning and thinking machines will have to reach beyond current engineering trends in both what they learn, and how they learn it. Specifically, we argue that these machines should (a) build causal models of the world that support explanation and understanding, rather than merely solving pattern recognition problems; [...] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1604.00289.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1604.00289.pdf Some others papers related to these ideas: - Learning a Theory of Causality http://stanford.edu/~ngoodman/papers/LTBC_psychreview_final.pdf http://stanford.edu/~ngoodman/papers/LTBC_psychreview_final.... - Theory-Based Causal Induction: http://cocosci.berkeley.edu/tom/papers/tbci.pdf http://cocosci.berkeley.edu/tom/papers/tbci.pdf -