Brad wrote: > So that if/when Ben succeeds, how is anyone to know that they're looking > at a real baby AI, and not some slight enhancement of the AIBO? They > won't. Only you, I and maybe 998 other other people would understand the > significance and these 1000 only because we're well versed with Ben's > activities. > > Any AGI will take a decade to make itself known and to rise above the > signal/noise ratio of scientific media.
I see your point, but I'm not so sure you're correct. I think about it this way: * Sometimes bullshit get huge amounts of media attention and money. * Sometimes really *demonstrably* valuable things get pathetically little media attention and money * Sometimes really demonstrably valuable things get huge amounts of media attention and money Assuming Novababy really eventuates like I hope/believe it will, I intend to ensure that Novamente AGI falls into the latter category. I don't think its sooooo impossible to achieve this, it just requires approaching the task of fundraising and publicity-seeking with some energy and inventiveness. I think I have a good idea of what achieving this requires. For instance, I have a good friend who lives here in DC who is a very successful PR agent and would be quite helpful on the media aspect of this (one of his jobs was doing PR for the Republic of Sealand, which was totally obscure before he started working with them, and wound up on the cover of Wired and in every major paper... and is a heck of a lot less generally interesting than Novamente...). And I know a few people in the US gov't research funding establishment, who personally like AGI, but who can't authorize AGI funding due to internal-politics constraints. It wouldn't take such a big nudge for the research-funding establishment to give them the go-ahead to follow their intuitions and fund AGI. I think that raising funds and serious positive publicity for a scientifically successful "baby AGI" project is a *hard* problem, but nowhere near as hard as making the baby AI in the first place. Confident as I am in Novamente, it's the "making the baby AI work" problem that worries me more, not the "how to publicize and monetize AGI once the baby AI works" problem!! -- Ben G ------- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
