> --- On Fri, 8/29/08, Mike Tintner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > From: Mike Tintner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Subject: Re: [agi] Re: Goedel machines ..PS > To: agi@v2.listbox.com > Date: Friday, August 29, 2008, 3:53 PM
> Ben, ... > If RSI were possible, then you should see some signs of it within human society, of > humans recursively self-improving - at however small a scale. You don't because of this > problem of crossing and integrating domains. It can all be done, but laboriously and > stumblingly not in some simple, formulaic way. That is culturally a very naive idea. I hope nobody minds if I interject with a brief narrative concerning a recent experience. Obviously I don't speak for Ben Goertzel, or anyone else who thinks RSI or recognizing superior intelligence is possible. As it happened, I was looking for a new job a while back, and landed an interview with a major corporate entity. When I spoke to the HR representative, she bemoaned the lack of hiring standards, especially for her own department. "It's impossible," she said, "As a consultant explained it to us a few years ago, the corporation changes with each person we hire or fire, changes into a related but different entity. If we measure the intelligence of a corporation in terms of how well suited it is to profit from its environment, my job is to make sure that people we hire (on average) result in the corporation becoming more intelligent." She looked at me for sympathy. "As if all our resources were enough to recognize (much less plan) an entity more intelligent than ourselves!" She had a point. "What's worse, we're expected to hire new HR staff and provide training that will make our department more effective at hiring new people." I nodded. That would lead to recursive self improvement (RSI), which is clearly impossible. Finally she said I seemed like the sympathetic sort, and even though that had nothing to do with her worthless hiring criteria, I could have the job and start right away. I thought about the problem later, and eventually concluded that one good HR strategy would be to form hundreds or thousands (millions?) of corporations with stochastic methods for hiring, firing, training, merging and creating spinoffs, perhaps using GP or MOSES or some such. Eventually, corporations would emerge with superior intelligence. The alternative would be a massive cross-disciplinary effort, only imaginable by a super-neo-da Vinci character who's a master of psychology, mathematics, economics, manufacturing, politics -- essentially every field of human knowledge, including medical sciences, history and the arts. I guess it doesn't look too hopeful, so we're probably going to be stuck with hiring, firing and training practices that mean absolutely nothing, forever. Charles Griffiths ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=111637683-c8fa51 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com