SOME ON THIS LIST *DO* "HAVE MUCH TO CONTRIBUTE" TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF AGI
I have also been on this list since the '90s and attended the 2008, 2009, 2011, and 2016 AGI conferences. I was quite active on this list in the late 2000s and early 2010s, since then I occasionally read a post, particularly if it appears to contain a link to an interesting article. In 2010 after attending a Humanity Plus conference held at Harvard, I wrote two posts on the Humanity Plus website. The first which claimed we had already solved all the major conceptual problems necessary to achieve AGI and could achieve it within 10 years once really big money came into the field (which didn't happen with my understanding of really big money until the late 2010's). That article got twice as many downloads as the next most downloaded article on the Humanity Plus site, which was by Ben Geortzel. My second article on that web site was on the possible effects of superintelligent machines upon humanity given the very mixed, complex qualities of human nature and human society. It got only slightly fewer downloads than Geortzel's most downloaded post. It is the subject matter of my second such post, in which those of us who understand most of the major philosophical issues in AI, and who have been thinking about the potential of AI for decades, have the most to offer. Many of us are just as capable of understanding the great dangers and great promise of AI, and speaking out about that, as young geeks at OpenAI or Deepmind. Our society needs vigorous public discussion of how AI can be used to help greatly improve the ability of media, voting, government, capitalism, markets, journalism, education, medicine, art, entertainment, law enforcement to either help or hurt the quality of human conscious existence. I think that those of us who have a much better than average understanding of AI, but not the money or position to do anything on big hardware still have an important role to play, and that includes trying to create and participate intelligent public discussion of what sort of AGI's should be created and how such AGI's should be used. If any on this list are interested in having a zoom to discuss the subject of democratic AI, that is AI that serves humans and human governance, please email me at ewpor...@gmail.com or respond on this gmail thread. Ed Porter On Sun, Aug 6, 2023 at 4:04 PM Matt Mahoney <mattmahone...@gmail.com> wrote: > I've been on this list for 20 years. My impression is the decline started > a long time ago when all the big projects at the time like OpenCog, NARS, > AIGO, and Genifer, ultimately failed and were abandoned. Some of the people > are still here but rarely post any more because they are busy with other > things. The people who do post (like me) aren't developing a project, so > don't really have much to contribute. The list used to be a place where you > could ask questions about AGI, but now we know the answer is lots of > hardware, software, data, and money. The big tech companies with trillion > dollar market caps are the ones doing AI, not us. > > In 2006 I started a text compression benchmark that ultimately showed the > superiority of neural networks for language modeling. In 2013 I published a > paper estimating the cost of AGI at $1 quadrillion. It's not something I > will even attempt to build. But we can talk about where the world is > headed, even if we can only play a small part in it. > > > On Sun, Aug 6, 2023, 2:46 PM WriterOfMinds <jennifer.hane....@gmail.com> > wrote: > >> As a fellow user of AiDreams, I get the impression that its decline has >> little to do with generative AI. A number of the regulars aged out of the >> hobby or simply quit the forum for personal reasons. Others were banned. >> And I think we aren't getting new people because forums just aren't "the >> place to be" on the internet anymore. I'm connected with several AI >> enthusiasts via Twitter and Mastodon who are either doing their own >> projects incorporating ChatGPT etc., or pursuing alternate projects despite >> the existence of ChatGPT, but they aren't forum members. >> > *Artificial General Intelligence List <https://agi.topicbox.com/latest>* > / AGI / see discussions <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi> + > participants <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/members> + > delivery options <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription> > Permalink > <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T469692845b7d2d7e-M8cb2ae77dbf210501cc9a388> > ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T469692845b7d2d7e-Md2c9c02f9a6a21913ebb81e0 Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
