As I wrote to Robin Hanson earlier today, the fact you don’t agree with what we view as the relatively high probability of success for our approach does not reflect poorly on either your intelligence or your knowledge of AI. If you haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about a Novamente-like approach there is no reason, no matter how bright you are that you should be able to understand its promise.
Maybe I shouldn't get into this, but . . . .
I've read the detailed Novamente design. It meshed very well with a lot of my previous intuitions and in some areas went into a lot more detail (and went into a lot less detail in others). I firmly believe that an AGI could be built on top of Novamente's design.
That being said, I don't believe that Novamente is particularly close to the fastest path to AGI for several reasons.
First, Novamente is a discovery system (and a *really* good one). The other parts of it's design, however, are not fully fleshed out and there are huge "a miracle happens here" holes. This is not to denigrate Ben and his team in any way, shape, or form. They've done wonders with their resources and can't do everything.
Second, over the past few years, I've become more and more convinced that discovery systems, while they do "learn", are not the type of learning that I think is necessary for AGI. Novamente can certainly tease out patterns from large quantities of data but it isn't fully designed (at this point) to do anything like reasoning by analogy, for example. Ben does have some plans for this but, my opinion is that, he is still in the realm of "a miracle happens here" on this subject.
Third, and I've said this before, there are some fundamental engineering features (scale-invariance of knowledge, ways of determining and exploiting encapsulation and modularity of knowledge without killing useful "leaky" abstractions, etc.) that aren't implemented yet in Novamente that really need to be implemented much earlier rather than later. Also, I have a lot of questions about Novamente's "memory" design.
In particular, I think that Novamente's foray into learning in a virtual world is either going to be incredibly useful or a rather large bust because it is precisely the type of learning that Novamente hasn't specialized in before this point.
A number of people on this list seem to regard Ben as almost a deity or a prophet. Ben is intelligent, creative, has a solid background, and gets to work hard in the field so he looks a lot better than most everyone else. It also means that he has polished his ideas and eliminated the most obvious problems. This does not, however, mean that he has a provably correct path. Novamente may lead to AGI (with *a lot* more hard work). Personally, as I've said, I believe that it is *a path* but one which will be overtaken and passed by a shorter, easier path (just as I believe that brain emulation is a path that will be overtaken and passed by a shorter, easier path).
When one simply looks at the difference between the brain emulation path and the Novamente path (much less other paths like Hawkins, etc), one has to realize that there is a *wide* range of potentially viable paths to AGI. What is particularly distressing is those individuals who insist on being Novamente fanboys without pointing to any specific features that are particularly important or unique. Ben and, for example, Richard argue in specific details. They pretty much understand where each other stands but disagree with some fundamental (but unprovable) assumptions on the other's part. Personally, it seems to me that Novamente could answer Richard's complaints with some tweaking and minor/moderate change of focus (since Novamente is actually more a framework than an absolutely rigid design in many ways) but that the two of them are currently more interested in being different that working together.
But this has gotten rather long so I should sum up . . . . Novamente has great promise -- but part of the reason why it has such great promise is because so much of it *hasn't* been fully determined yet. The design is still open enough that it can be stretched to fit many things. The problem is that stretching it in some directions may/probably will make it less adept at other things (jack of all trades/master of none) and it may well be (and this is my primary complaint) that it is *so* general that, while it could serve as the basis of an AGI, it is far more complicated than necessary to do so (just as a bird's biology is not necessary for flight). Thus, those blindly insisting that Novamente is the be-all-and-end-all and that all other approaches should be abandoned are not doing any of us a service. I want to see Novamente go forward but we shouldn't put all of our eggs in one basket.
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