hi > I'm also extremely interested in biological applications, but > maybe your choice is biased by your (emotional) preference for > science and is actually not optimal / rational.
I'm sure it's rational; of course I'm not sure it's *optimal*! Business is not a very exact science, and one is always making choices based on intuitive assessments of a large number of complexly interrelated factors. Optimality is really never an issue. A key point is that I was able to think of a lot of concrete ways to use AI to make marketable products in the biology domain. This is because I'm a scientist and have a good intuition for such things. So the basis of our company Biomind LLC is not just our Novamente AI system but -- just as importantly -- a host of other scientific ideas I had that bridge the gap between Novamente's general capabilities and the specific problems involved in the bio domain. Having knowledge of and intuition for the domain of application is probably THE MOST IMPORTANT THING in doing practical AI applications --- be they commercial or academic, be they proto-AGI or pure-narrow-AI. >By looking at > some employment statistics, I guesstimate the most profitable > AI applications should be retail and food industries, and slowly > work its way up more complex areas (eg health care such as robotic > surgery or medical expert systems etc), and then even more complex > ones such as those requiring natural language understanding, and > other cognitive abilities. But this kind of analysis is so extremely coarse that I'm not sure it's useful at all. The pragmatics of selling products into these different industries needs to be taken into account. I really don't know a good way to sell AI in the retail and food industries, for example; whereas I do know how to sell AI-driven bioinformatics tools into the biopharma market. Sure, you could try to sell AI-based datamining to Wal-mart and the like. But I'm not sure this is really a better business proposition than selling AI-based tools to biopharma? One advantage of selling to biopharma is that the people involved are scientists and hence are generally more open to radical ideas than average business-types would be. If anyone on this list has good connections with the datamining-related people at Walmart or other major retail chains, I'd be happy to meet with them and pitch them proto-AGI-based-datamining. I'd be happy to take a temporary (paid) contract to analyze some data for them, just to show them what our software can do on their data ;-) > Unless you think AGI does not need this bottom-up approach... I think there are many paths to AGI, not just one.... And I think that NO business application is going to take us all the way to AGI -- doing business apps can help us develop various aspects of our proto-AGI systems, but ultimately you've got to teach a baby mind and that is a research project not a business project, due to the very many uncertainties involved. We are doing business apps like Biomind because they're fascinating & valuable in themselves (extending life, curing diseases, etc.), because they help us develop and test various *parts* of our AI systems, and because they pay our salaries ;-) But it's a mistake to try to map the business-app goals too closely onto the AGI goals -- although it's great when the two harmonize, as is somewhat the case with our Biomind work right now... ben ------- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
