Russell On 6/27/08, Russell Wallace <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote
> My ultimate vision? YES! One of my "tricks" in pulling out-of-control projects out of the soup, is to ask for a vision of how the task will be performed in ~100 years in the future. Often that vision is much simpler than what they are now trying to build, so the project can be retargeted to do more with less, salvaging much of the core capability and wrapping it up differently. > I would break the bounds that currently trammel > our species, stem the global loss of fifty million lives a year and > open the path to space colonization. I would make Earth-descended > sentient life immortal. Imagine smart CAD programs helping design cell > repair nanomachines. Imagine an O'Neill habitat being built by a swarm > of robots with their human supervisors in pressurized environments. > None of this is beyond the conceptual limits of the human mind, but it > is beyond what humans can _reasonably_ do with present-day technology, > because it takes too much time. Unlike many posters here, I don't > believe human-equivalent AGI is feasible in any meaningful timescale. > Nor do I believe it's necessary. Humans can continue to make the > high-level decisions. What we need, to accomplish great things, is > machines that can handle the details. Just one gotcha - this will send even more people (like many of us) to the unemployment lines, until their benefits expire. Some social restructuring is necessary both now and in the future. > That, I hope you'll agree, is worth devoting one's life toward? Provided of course that the riches derived therefrom don't go to only ~1% of the population. Your vision would become the means of ultimate enslavement to countless future generations if left in the hands of our present government and society. I am NOT saying that AGIs would necessarily be a bad thing, but rather that our present government and society are highly defective, and the presence of AGIs will only amplify those problems. > > I believe that a complete revolution in man's dealing with his problems > is > > right here to be had. Dr. Eliza certainly illustrates that there is > probably > > enough low hanging fruit to be worth immediately redesigning the Internet > to > > collect it and promptly extend the lives of most of the people on Earth. > > That sounds interesting, can you be more specific on what you would do and > how? All that would be needed to make Dr. Eliza work are: 1. Some new HTML tags to indicate metadata needed to make Dr. Eliza work, e.g. the syntax of what people typically say who have a problem whose solution is explained in the associated article. Many of these are optional and some are rare, e.g. the syntax of what people who are completely unfamiliar with a subject area typically say, For example someone saying that their "car doesn't go" is probably expressing a lack of mechanical knowledge, and so should be presented with a brief article explaining that cars have engines, transmissions, etc., so if it makes running noises, the engine is probably OK, etc. 2. HTML and Wikipedia composition tools that present forms to fill in, and then create the above tags from those forms. 3. Global agents like Google and/or Wiki that gather up the above tags from the entire Internet and present them all in a single database, and provide periodic updates to prior "base" databases. There is still some hot debate over what tags should be utilized. My view is that all of the ones that I have seen are important for some classes of problems. However, the list is still fairly short. Some you may not be familiar with, e.g. the type of cause-and-effect chain link that the described phenomenon represents. This would all be SO simple to do... Steve Richfield ------------------------------------------- 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=106510220-47b225 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
