Steve Richfield wrote:
Hi there,
I am coming at AGI from an apparently unique perspective. Back in 2001 I
contracted an "incurable" illness (idiopathic atrial fibrillation).
Having been involved in a couple of medical research projects in the
long distant past, I simply took this as another project and dived in to
find a cure. After 4 months of researching during every conscious moment
(my AF left me unconscious most afternoons), I did indeed find a one-day
cure (followed by a year of recovery). The cure (resetting my body
temperature back to 98.6F) isn't what is interesting here. What IS
interesting here is why this took me 4 months instead of ~1 hour.
Certainly there was SOMETHING wrong with the Internet as it presently
exists. Continuing my story...
Just days later, I got a project repairing some "unrepairable" circuit
boards for ~$20M military aircraft simulators. I brought
my 18-year-old daughter into the project as my apprentice to perform
some of the lengthy and boring testing. She had observed my curing of my
AF and seen some other successful medical research projects, and after a
week on the job commented that the process of repairing circuit boards
is just like curing illnesses, only the very specific activities (e.g.
screening for errant metabolic parameters vs. screening for nodes with
errant dynamic impedances) were different. We talked about this for
several weeks, and she was exactly right.
I then decided to write an AI program to solve very difficult problems,
which gradually morphed into the Dr. Eliza that has been presented and
demonstrated by my kids at various past WORLDCOMP AI conferences. Dr.
Eliza does NOT deal in direct questions, but rather takes problem
statements and drills down into whatever it was that the author needed
NOT to know to have such a problem. After all, the only reason that we
have problems is that there is something important that we don't already
understand or haven't already applied.
Meanwhile, I was participating heavily in Yahoo's WS-Forum, helping
others with similar internal regulatory problems. I loaded Dr. Eliza
with my own essential knowledge about errant body temperatures and
"idiopathic" atrial fibrillation and started throwing unretouched
postings into Dr. Eliza. Surprisingly, Dr. Eliza often noticed subtle
indirect references to contributory factors that I had missed on my own
readings of the postings. In short, with only ~200 of my own knowledge
records in its knowledge base, it was serious competition to ME.
I then added the ability to exchange knowledge via USENET with other
incarnations of Dr. Eliza, so that many authors could contribute to a
knowledge base that would WAY outperform any of the individual authors.
OK, so why aren't I rich? For the same reasons that most smart guys
aren't rich. People simply don't trust anyone or anything that may be
smarter than they are. I have a good friend who is the Director of
Research for a major University's medical center. I discussed Dr.
Eliza at length with him, and he flatly stated that there was NO
POLITICAL WAY to integrate such a product into any major medical
environment, simply because no doctor is going to stand aside and watch
a computer run circles around them.
BTW, the principles behind Dr. Eliza are rather unique. I'd be glad to
send some papers to anyone who is interested. Briefly, Joe Weisenbaum's
original Eliza was built on two concepts, one good and one bad, that no
one previously separated. The good concept was that individual links in
complex cause and effect chains could be recognized by the occurrence of
slightly variable but easily describable snippets of text/speech. The
bad concept was that text/speech could be usefully manipulated by
juggling words around. Joe then wrote a book discrediting his own Eliza
(with its unseparated concepts), thereby causing AI research to take a
wrong turn 40 years ago from which it never recovered. However, the
internals of Dr. Eliza aren't really the subject of this posting, other
than to demonstrate that AGI now already exists, at least in this one
potentially useful form.
Extrapolating into the future: I see no hope for this group to mitigate
the impact of AGI, nor should it, any more than the Luddites were able
to blunt the entry of modern mechanized manufacturing. The one thing
that writing Dr. Eliza drilled into me is that people, even PhDs, even
me, are REALLY REALLY STUPID compared with computationally combining the
expertise of many people. That the Dr. Eliza project included the
discovery of Reverse Reductio ad Absurdum reasoning that is crucial to
solving apparently irresolvable disputes hammers this home,
since society's failure to understand RRAA underlies nearly every
dispute world history, yet this somehow went undiscovered during
millennia of wars and other disputes. Providing some mechanized
intelligence is a service and a hope for mankind's future sanity, and
the only "threat" that I see is that some true believers in the truly
absurd will truly get ground under AGI's wheels, as they truly should.
Any thoughts on all this?
Steve Richfield
Steve,
I would be interested to see any papers you have written on it.
Your experience with the medical community is not too surprising: I
believe that the Expert Systems folks had similar troubles way back when.
Richard Loosemore
-------------------------------------------
agi
Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now
RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/
Modify Your Subscription:
http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=98558129-0bdb63
Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com