Mike Tintner wrote in his Wed 10/3/2007 6:22 PM post:
"BUT THERE'S NO ONE REMOTELY CLOSE TO THE LEVEL, SAY, OF VON NEUMANN OR TURING, RIGHT? AND DO YOU REALLY THINK A REVOLUTION SUCH AS AGI IS GOING TO COME ABOUT WITHOUT THAT KIND OF REVOLUTIONARY, CREATIVE THINKER? JUST BY TWEAKING EXISTING SYSTEMS, AND INCREASING COMPUTER POWER AND COMPLEXITY? HAS ANY INTELLECTUAL REVOLUTION EVER HAPPENED THAT WAY?? " First, I would be very surprised if there are not quite a few people in these fields with IQs roughly as high as Turing and Von Neumann. I dont know exactly how many standard deviations they were above average, but the IQ bell curve is not going down. The evidence is its going up. Plus the percent of the worlds children who are receiving good educations is increasing all the time. So there should actually be more really brilliant thinkers now than in any imagined past age of supposed mental Titans. Of course, as technical and scientific fields develop there is less bold new fertile ground to be broken and fewer truly seminal ideas left to develop. My teenage son is into rock and roll. He bemoans that there isn't as much excitingly new music today as in the late sixties to mid-seventies. Thats because so much fertile conceptual musical ground was broken in those years, and, thus, there are fewer vast really new and yet satisfying expanses to explore. The same is true in AI, the field is over fifty years old. A lot of very valuable thinking was done in each of those five decades. People like Turing, Shannon, Minsky, Quillian, Simon, Newall, and Shank, to mention a very very few, have done some really good foundational work. So there is much less room for revolutionary breakthroughs. At this point I think synthesis, and large scale experimentation, and tweaking is probably required more than revolutionary breakthroughs. In fact, I think some people actually have a pretty good idea about how to achieve human level AGI, or at least something much closer to it. I don't want to sound like a one note piano, but take Novamente for example. Read the longer articles Ben Goertzel has written about it carefully several times and then try to open your mind to exactly what such a system could do if running on massive hardware and trained sufficiently well to have human level world knowledge. There is a lot of fertile ground to be plowed by getting systems of that type up and running on world-knowledge-computing-capable hardware with the proper training and then seeing where it gets us. My hunch is that with the right teams and the right, yes, tweaking, it will get us pretty damn far. And if it does not get us to truly human level AI, it will at least provide us with extremely powerful and valuable advances in computation, and -- more importantly to the issue of this post -- give us a much more clear understanding of the problems that have yet to be solved to actually get us there. I think we understand a lot about semantic meaning, generalized semantic representation, non-literal matching and invariant representation, goal systems and importance weighting, automatic learning, massively parallel and context and goal sensitive probabilistic inference, and the focusing of such inferences though mechanisms like intelligent parallel terraced scans, task specific learned search parameter tuning, dynamic search control feedback mechanisms, dynamic thresholding, accumulated prior activation, and consciousness, itself -- and many many more pieces of this fascinating, whiring, wizing, flashing, throbing, computational puzzle. Now is the time to start putting this stuff together in large systems and see who can be the first team to get it all to work together well. Deb Roy, is a very bright guy at the MIT media lab who is doing some really wild and crazy stuff. After a lecture he gave to a relatively small audience at MIT roughly two years ago, I went up to the lectern and told him I didnt see any brick walls between us and human level AI, that is, I didnt see any part of the AI problem that we dont already have reasonable approaches to. I asked him if him if he know of any. He answered with a smile I dont see any brick walls either The biggest brick wall is the small-hardware mindset that has been absolutely necessary for decades to get anything actually accomplished on the hardware of the day. But it has caused people to close their minds to the vast power of brain level hardware and the computational richness and complexity it allows, and has caused them, instead, to look for magic conceptual bullets that would allow them to achieve human-like AI on hardware that has roughly a millionth the computational, representational, and interconnect power of the human brain. Thats like trying to model New York City with a town of seven people. This problem has been compounded by the pressure for academic specialization and the pressure to produce demonstratable results on the type of hardware most have had access to in the past. Rather than this small hardware thinking, those in the field of AGI should open up their minds to the power of big numbers -- complexity as some call It -- one of the most seminal concepts in all of science. They should look at all of the very powerful tools AI has already cooked up for us and think how these tools can be put together into powerful systems once we were are free from the stranglehold of massively sub-human hardware - as we are now starting to be. They should start thinking how do we actually do appropriate probabilistic and goal weighted inference in world knowledge with brain level hardware in real time. Some have already spend a lot of time thinking about exactly this. Those who are interested in AGi -- and havent already done so -- should follow their lead. Edward W. Porter Porter & Associates 24 String Bridge S12 Exeter, NH 03833 (617) 494-1722 Fax (617) 494-1822 [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----Original Message----- From: Mike Tintner [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, October 03, 2007 6:22 PM To: agi@v2.listbox.com Subject: Re: [agi] Religion-free technical content Edward Porter:I dont know about you, but I think there are actually a lot of very bright people in the interrelated fields of AGI, AI, Cognitive Science, and Brain science. There are also a lot of very good ideas floating around. Yes there are bright people in AGI. But there's no one remotely close to the level, say, of von Neumann or Turing, right? And do you really think a revolution such as AGI is going to come about without that kind of revolutionary, creative thinker? Just by tweaking existing systems, and increasing computer power and complexity? Has any intellectual revolution ever happened that way? 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