On Mon, Dec 24, 2012 at 11:33 PM, Ben Goertzel <[email protected]> wrote: >> I find it >> curious that a system that could potentially replace most human labor, >> worth hundreds of trillions of dollars, can't even find a few million. >> Are people really betting that you have less chance of success than >> winning a lottery? > > The inconsistency of humans' judgments is well known; this is far from > the only instance of the phenomenon ;p > > There are various issues going on here, including (according to my > crude guessing) fear of the Terminator, left-over effects from the old > AI Winter, and most of all peoples' general fear and skepticism of the > unknown...
One would hope that large companies that have an interest in AI and a lot of money to invest (Google, IBM, Microsoft, Facebook, etc) would be more rational. It is easy to place the blame elsewhere, but not productive. When I look at the OpenCog roadmap: http://opencog.org/roadmap/ I see predictions like: "Creation of an OpenCog-based artificial scientist, operating a small molecular biology laboratory on its own, designing its own experiments and operating the equipment and analyzing the results and describing them in English." "Creation of an OpenCog-based service robot, which carries out basic household tasks in a manner driven by English-language communication, and knowledge sharing with the network of other robots." supposedly in 4 to 5 years. In 6 to 8 years we will have full-on human level AGI. In 8 to 10 years we will have advanced self improvement. Naturally I am skeptical, so I research the last 16 years going back to the beginning of Webmind: http://opencog.org/research/ paying close attention to papers that have a "results" section. This leads me to the virtual puppy demo and accompanying papers from around 2010. http://novamente.net/example/ The papers make no mention of MOSES or DeSTIN, as these have not yet been integrated. But another paper in 2010 proposes to do that as part of imbuing a Nao robot with child level AGI in 3 years. Since next week will be 3 years, I guess it would be a legitimate question at this point to ask how that project is progressing? But I am intrigued at least by the possibility of natural language understanding. A more careful inspection shows that one of the papers, http://goertzel.org/ICAI_CogSyn_paper.pdf mentions that RelEx was used to extract semantic information and make inferences from biomedical research abstracts. I go to the reference: http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/W/W06/W06-3317.pdf but I am disappointed to find that all of the work is done with hand-coded rules and that the results are anecdotal. So really, the puppy demo isn't doing anything more sophisticated than SHRDLU did around 1968-1970, except that the graphics are better. I am not writing this to be critical or because I am trolling. I really do want to see AGI, and I think that it is going to happen, given the enormous incentives to automate human labor. We all know that vision, language, and robotics will require massive computing power, and this will be expensive. Making grandiose predictions is not the best way to get funding. But even worse is going for years or decades without being able to show progress. I don't mean to imply that there hasn't been progress, but without measurable test results, we don't even know for ourselves if there really is any or if we are just fooling ourselves. -- -- Matt Mahoney, [email protected] ------------------------------------------- AGI Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/21088071-f452e424 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21088071&id_secret=21088071-58d57657 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
