Agents that imagine and plan
Why do we need to explicitly design architectures such as the "imagination encoder" the article describes? A proposed long term goal of deep learning is to have AI that surpasses human cognition (e.g. DeepMind's About page touts that they are "developing programs that can learn to solve any complex problem without needing to be taught how"), which was <i>not</i> explicitly designed in terms of architectural components such as an "imagination encoder".<p>Shouldn't imagination and planning be observed spontaneously as emergent properties of a sufficiently complex neural network? Conversely, if we have to explicitly account for these properties and come up with specific designs to emulate them, how do we know that we are on the right track to beyond human levels of cognition, and not just building "one-trick networks"?