Brad Paulsen wrote:
Fellow AGI-ers,
At the risk of being labeled the list's newsboy...
U.S. Plan for 'Thinking Machines' Repository
Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday May 28, @07:19PM
from the save-those-ideas-for-later dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Information scientists organized by the
U.S.'s NIST say they will create a "concept bank" that programmers can
use to build thinking machines that reason about complex problems at the
frontiers of knowledge - from advanced manufacturing to biomedicine. The
agreement by ontologists - experts in word meanings and in using
appropriate words to build actionable machine commands - outlines the
critical functions of the Open Ontology Repository (OOR). More on the
summit that produced the agreement here."
Interesting, but I am araid that whenever I see someone report a project
to collect all the world's knowledge in a nice, centralized format (Cyc,
and Daughters-of-Cyc) I cannot help but think of one of the early
chapters in Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver, were Wilkins, Leibnitz and
others are trying to form a universal grammar in which all the world's
facts can be organized in such a way that a (essentially) a thinking
machine can be built.
Stephenson illustrates the foolishness of this quest with humor, but it
is a deeply thought-provoking humor.
The main thought that it provokes are these. If we can build something
that can use those facts, it must be smart enough to be able collect
such information by itself. Not only that, but the way that this
hypothetical machine would collect and use the facts might well be such
that the format in which the knowledge is represented will be critically
dependent on the way that the using and collecting processes operate,
and not necessarily like the format that we choose, ahead of time.
Today, we most emphatically do not have a system that knows how to
(fully) use and collect such facts.
Therefore... there is a great danger that any such collection will be
useless until the 'thinking machinery' itself is built, and then, when
the machinery does get built, the collection of facts will be superfluous.
Rather like my 8-year-old son (bless his heart) who, confronted with an
essay project that he could not face, started off by spending four solid
hours getting the fonts, colors and backgrounds just right.
Just my gut feeling, that's all: carry on with what you are doing.
Richard Loosemore
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agi
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