The Intelligence Initiative at MIT is an unparalleled, multidisciplinary quest to answer the cosmic question of just how intelligence works.

I2 Multidisciplinary Diagram

Some of the questions the Intelligence Initiative at MIT will address:

How do human minds arise through processes of evolution, development and learning, and what are their roots in genetics?

How does collective intelligence arise in social and economic systems?

How can we harness collective intelligence?

How can we avoid a crisis like the recent one by understanding better how groups of intelligent agents-- and societies -- can be engineered to take decisions more intelligently?

How does the mind learn about the world from sensory data and use that knowledge to plan adaptive behavior? How can we design machine perception, learning and planning algorithms with more human-like intelligence?

How is human knowledge stored, represented and organized?

How do human minds arise through processes of evolution and development?

How do genes interact with experience?

How is the “software” of the mind implemented in the “wetware” of the brain? How can we build more intelligent synthetic hardware?

Are there fundamental physical or mathematical laws explaining the emergence of intelligent or adaptive behavior across different systems and scales?