Eugen> IBM is smart. They know what they're doing.

Yeah! What an impressive argument.


Eugen> There are shorter paths, but nobody knows where they are....

There is more known about the "shorter paths" than actual the functioning of
the human mind/brain.

* All current useful robots are engineered, not reverse-engineered.
* All AI successes so far are engineered solutions, not copies of wetware
(Deep Blue, Darpa Challenge, Google, etc.)
* Planes have been flying for >100 years, yet we haven't even
reverse-engineered a sparrow's fart...


Ben> ... the prophecy that human brain emulation will be the initial path to
AGI could become a self-fulfilling one.

Ben, your comment seems to reflect your frustration at lack of funding
rather than a realistic assessment of the situation. Even if no *dedicated*
AGI engineering project is first to achieve AGI, people in the software/AI
community will "stumble on" a solution long before reverse engineering
becomes feasible. Don't you agree?

Peter Voss
http://adaptiveai.com/ 



-----Original Message-----
From: Eugen Leitl [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 

On Sun, Jan 21, 2007 at 10:03:52AM -0500, Benjamin Goertzel wrote:

> One thing I find interesting is that IBM is focusing their AGI-ish
> efforts so tightly on human-brain-emulation-related approaches.

IBM is smart. They know what they're doing.
 
> Kurzweil, as is well known, has forecast that human brain emulation is
> the most viable path to follow to get to AGI.  I agree that it is a
> viable path, but I don't think it is anywhere near the shortest path.

There are shorter paths, but nobody knows where they are. That's
the key point of it: the world is complicated. Dealing with the
world takes lost of machinery. There's a strange cognitive bias in
people, AIlers specifically, to think that AI is based on some
simple generic method, and they just know what it is. No validation
or further evidence required; it's all obvious. Whomever
you ask, they all know it, but all their answers differ. Historically,
this approach has failed abysmally. Trying to reverse-engineer
a known working system might do less for one's ego, but it's the only
game in town, as far as I can see.

> However, I think it's possible (though not extremely likely) that if
> all the pundits and funding sources (like IBM) continue to harp on the
> brain-emulation approach to the exclusion of other approaches, the
> prophecy that human brain emulation will be the initial path to AGI
> could become a self-fulfilling one ;-p ...

In this race, there are no second places.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org";>leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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