Despite the title about free will, the Judea Pearl essay is really about the use of stochastic methods in AI problems (note keywords "bayesian" and "counterfactual") as the way forward. That's the underlying theme to several of the articles. It's less about philosophy than it is the current state of the art in machine learning, optimization and game theory. A good example of this approach is the poker research from the U. of Alberta.

One thing I did not appreciate until reading these papers is that playing poker, an imperfect information game, requires far more computer power than playing a game like chess. The theory is much deeper and computational complexity greater. So while the popular culture still thinks of chess as an analogue for thought, the reality is that poker is a much better model problem. I was completely ignorant of convex optimization and game theory until a few weeks ago (when I started reading the research papers). It's exciting stuff. I suspect several of the authors for the Forbes AI Report feel the same way.

yeah, I noticed he doesn't really mention free will except in the title and in the last paragraph where he claims it's an illusion. The rest of the essay is about mathematical techniques. Your phrase would have made a better title for his paper; "Stochastic Methods in AI: A Way Forward". :)

I was rather unimpressed with the quaility of several of the articles/authors.

Hugo de Garis (The Coming Artilect War) has a history of making wild promises that never materialize, but that do manage to attract million $ research grants.

Michael Vassar (Machine Minds), president of the Singularity Institute, formerly founder of SirGroovy.com, (music industry), who babbles endlessly about elephants and ducks, but does not appear to fully fathom the machine intelligence problem.

Ben Goertzel (AI And What To Do About It) looks like another snakeoil promoter who is looking for yet another sucker, like Augustus Melmotte in "The Way We Live Now".

Forbes probably encouraged provocative titles and themes to make the essays more attractive to a popular readership. There was tension from catering to very different audiences. The business world sees "quantitative science" as the solution to intractably large problems. The math/stat/CS people are just having fun with cool stuff. Neither viewpoint is very interesting to a popular audience. So to draw readers, more humanistic themes as from science fiction are necessary.