As someone with 5+ years of experience in the field, I think you’re impression of current ML is not very accurate. It’s true that we haven’t *solved* the problem of “online learning” (what you probably mean is something more like “continual learning” or “lifelong learning”), but a fair number of people are working on those problems (with a fairly incremental approach, granted). You can find several recent workshops on those topics recently, and work going back to the 90s at least.
It’s also true that long-term planning, credit assignment, memory preservation, and other forms of “stability” appear to be a central challenge to making this stuff work. On the other hand, we don’t know that humans are stable in the limit, just for ~100yrs, so there very well may be no non-heuristic solution to these problems.
As someone with 5+ years of experience in the field, I think you’re impression of current ML is not very accurate. It’s true that we haven’t *solved* the problem of “online learning” (what you probably mean is something more like “continual learning” or “lifelong learning”), but a fair number of people are working on those problems (with a fairly incremental approach, granted). You can find several recent workshops on those topics recently, and work going back to the 90s at least.
It’s also true that long-term planning, credit assignment, memory preservation, and other forms of “stability” appear to be a central challenge to making this stuff work. On the other hand, we don’t know that humans are stable in the limit, just for ~100yrs, so there very well may be no non-heuristic solution to these problems.