What the computer makes with the data it receives depends on the information of the transferred data, its internal algorithms and its internal data. This is the same with humans and natural language.
Language understanding would be useful to teach the AGI with existing knowledge already represented in natural language. But natural language understanding suffers from the problem of ambiguities. These ambiguities can be solved by having similar knowledge as humans have. But then you have a recursive problem because first there has to be solved the problem to obtain this knowledge. Nature solves this problem with embodiment. Different people make similar experiences since the laws of nature do not depend on space and time. Therefore we all can imagine a dog which is angry. Since we have experienced angry dogs but we haven't experienced angry trees we can resolve the linguistic ambiguity of my former example and answer the question: Who was angry? The way to obtain knowledge with embodiment is hard and long even in virtual worlds. If the AGI shall understand natural language it would be necessary that it makes similar experiences as humans make in the real world. But this would need a very very sophisticated and rich virtual world. At least, there have to be angry dogs in the virtual world ;-) As I have already said I do not think the relation between utility of this approach and the costs would be positive for first AGI. - Matthias >>> William Pearson [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote If I specify in a language to a computer that it should do something, it will do it no matter what (as long as I have sufficient authority). Telling a human to do something, e.g. wave your hands in the air and shout, the human will decide to do that based on how much it trusts you and whether they think it is a good idea. Generally a good idea in a situation where you are attracting the attention of rescuers, otherwise likely to make you look silly. I'm generally in favour of getting some NLU into AIs mainly because a lot of the information we have about the world is still in that form, so an AI without access to that information would have to reinvent it, which I think would take a long time. Even mathematical proofs are still somewhat in natural language. Other than that you could work on machine language understanding where information was taken in selectively and judged on its merits not its security credentials. Will Pearson ------------------------------------------- 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=117534816-b15a34 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
