>From what I can tell, Google's tech leaders are smart, inventive and
good-hearted people who are  not, however, deep thinkers about AGI ...
they are too busy for that...

Demis and Shane are brilliant, inventive, deep-thinking people who are
however apparently convinced that loose brain emulation (Demis) or
some mix of loose brain emulation and algorithmic information based
approaches (Shane) are the best approach to AGI ... so they are simply
not that intellectually interested in approaches like OpenCog, even
though they're aware of it...

I would like to have more funds so we could hire more senior
developers and proceed faster.  However, I would not like this *as
badly* as I prefer the project to remain free and open source, as I
feel FOSS AGI will be the best course for the good of the humanity and
will increase the odds of a positive Singularity.     So being fully
sucked into a big company or gov't agency or typical VC-funded AI
startup situation is not so compelling to me at this point... indeed
opportunities for this have been presented ...

The odds seem reasonable that with the current favorable climate
toward AGI, OpenCog will be able to secure greater funding during the
next year, so it can grow faster in various directions without
"selling out" ....

Once we get the project past a certain critical threshold in terms of
funky downloadable demos AND clear documentation and simpler usabilty
by developers, then I think the thing can really take off quickly, and
become as I've said "the Linux of AGI" (just for a start).   Getting
to this threshold is proving slow and laborious given the complexity
of the design.  But from the inside, the progress is clear.  A
moderate-sized burst of funding would get us there, but we can also
very likely get there without that, just not quite as fast...

-- Ben





On Sat, Jul 30, 2016 at 5:08 AM, Andi <gabilor...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Ben, my congratulations for reaching this point!
>
> I am watching the AI scene since more than 40 years - as far as I can see,
> the opencog stystem is the richest and by far most probable to build an AGI.
>
> Why Google does not chain you and your team to a desk at their
> headquarters?????????????
> They need to spend about 500.000.000 USD on new projects every week. Why
> they do not put one week on you and your team????
> AGI is essential for them. Opecog is the only complete approach to reach it.
> Is there nobody at Google who watch closely opencog -and- understand what it
> is doing?????
>
> Respect!
> Andi
>
>
>
>
>
> Am Freitag, 29. Juli 2016 03:32:11 UTC+2 schrieb Ben Goertzel:
>>
>> (proposed R&D project for fall 2016 - 2017)
>>
>> We are now pretty close (a month away, perhaps?) to having an initial,
>> reasonably reliable version of an OpenCog-controlled Hanson robot
>> head, carrying out basic verbal and nonverbal interactions.   This
>> will be able to serve as a platform for Hanson Robotics product
>> development, and also for ongoing OpenCog R&D aimed at increasing
>> levels of embodied intelligence.
>>
>> This email makes a suggestion regarding the thrust of the R&D side of
>> the ongoing work, to be done once the initial version is ready.  This
>> R&D could start around the beginning of September, and is expected to
>> take 9-12 months…
>>
>>
>> GENERAL IDEA:
>> Initial experiment on using OpenCog for learning language from
>> experience, using the Hanson robot heads and associated tools
>>
>> In other words, the idea is to use simple conversational English
>> regarding small groups of people observed by a robot head, as a
>> context in which to experiment with our already-written-down ideas
>> about experience-based language learning.
>>
>> BASIC PERCEPTION:
>>
>> I think we can do some interesting language-learning work without
>> dramatic extensions of our current perception framework.  Extending
>> the perception framework is valuable but can be done in parallel with
>> using the current framework to drive language learning work.
>>
>> What I think we need to drive language learning work initially, is
>> that the robot can tell, at each point in time:
>>
>> — where people’s faces are (and assign a persistent label to each person’s
>> face)
>>
>> — which people are talking
>>
>> — whether an utterance is happy or unhappy (and maybe some additional
>> sentiment)
>>
>> — if person A’s face is pointed at person B’s face (so that if A is
>> talking, A is likely talking to B) [not yet implemented, but can be
>> done soon]
>>
>> — the volume of a person’s voice
>>
>> — via speech-to-text, what people are saying
>>
>> — where a person’s hand is pointing [not yet implemented, but can be done
>> soon]
>>
>> — when a person is moving, leaving or arriving [not yet implemented,
>> but can be done soon]
>>
>> — when a person sits down or stands up [not yet implemented, but can
>> be done soon]
>>
>> — gender recognition (woman/man), maybe age recognition
>>
>> EXAMPLES OF LANGUAGE ABOUT THESE BASIC PERCEPTIONS
>>
>> While simple this set of initial basic perceptions lets a wide variety
>> of linguistic constructs get uttered, e.g.
>>
>> Bob is looking at Ben
>>
>> Bob is telling Jane some bad news
>>
>> Bob looked at Jane before walking away
>>
>> Bob said he was tired and then sat down
>>
>> People more often talk to the people they are next to
>>
>> Men are generally taller than women
>>
>> Jane is a woman
>>
>> Do you think women tend to talk more quietly than men?
>>
>> Do you think women are quieter than men?
>>
>> etc. etc.
>>
>> It seems clear that this limited domain nevertheless supports a large
>> amount of linguistic and communicative complexity.
>>
>> SECOND STAGE OF PERCEPTIONS
>>
>> A second stage of perceptual sophistication, beyond the basic
>> perceptions, would be to have recognition of a closed class of
>> objects, events and properties, e.g.:
>>
>> Objects:
>> — Feet, hands, hair, arms, legs (we should be able to get a lot of
>> this from the skeleton tracker)
>> — Beard
>> — Glasses
>> — Head
>> — Bottle (e.g. water bottle), cup (e.g. coffee cup)
>> — Phone
>> — Tablet
>>
>> Properties:
>> — Colors: a list of color values can be recognized, I guess
>> — Tall, short, fat, thin, bald — for people
>> — Big, small — for person
>> — Big, small — for bottle or phone or tablet
>>
>> Events:
>> — Handshake (between people)
>> — Kick (person A kicks person B)
>> — Punch
>> — Pat on the head
>> — Jump up and down
>> — Fall down
>> — Get up
>> — Drop (object)
>> — Pick up (object)
>> — Give (A gives object X to B)
>> — Put down (object) on table or floor
>>
>>
>> CORPUS PREPARATION
>>
>> While the crux of the proposed project is learning via real-time
>> interaction between the robot and humans, in the early stages it will
>> also be useful to experiment with “batch learning” from recorded
>> videos of human interactions, video-d from the robot’s point of view.
>>
>> As one part of supporting this effort, I’d suggest that we
>>
>> 1) create a corpus of videos of 1-5 people interacting in front of the
>> robot, from the robot’s cameras
>>
>> 2) create a corpus of sentences describing the people, objects and
>> events in the videos, associating each sentence with a particular
>> time-interval in one of the videos
>>
>> 3) translate the sentences to Lojban and add them to our parallel
>> Lojban corpus, so we can be sure we have good logical mappings of all
>> the sentences in the corpus
>>
>> Obviously, including the Stage Two perceptions along with the Basic
>> Perceptions, allows a much wider range of descriptions, e.g. …
>>
>> A tall man with a hat is next to a short woman with long brown hair
>>
>> The tall man is holding a briefcase in his left hand
>>
>> The girl who just walked in in a midget with only one leg
>>
>> Fred is bald
>>
>> Vytas fell down, then Ruiting picked him up
>>
>> Jim is pointing at her hat.
>>
>> Jim pointing at her hat and smiling made her blush.
>>
>> However, for initial work, I would say it’s best if at least 50% of
>> the descriptive sentences involve only Basic Perceptions … so we can
>> get language learning experimentation rolling right away, without
>> waiting for extended perception…
>>
>> LANGUAGE LEARNING
>>
>> What I then suggest is that we
>>
>> 1) Use the ideas from Linas & Ben’s “unsupervised language learning”
>> paper to learn a small “link grammar dictionary” from the corpus
>> mentioned above.  Critically, the features associated with each word
>> should include features from non-linguistic PERCEPTION, not just
>> features from language.  (The algorithms in the paper support this,
>> even though non-linguistic features are only very briefly mentioned in
>> the paper.)  ….  There are various ways to use PLN inference chaining
>> and Shujing’s information-theoretic Pattern Miner (both within
>> OpenCog)  in the implementation of these ideas…
>>
>> 2) Once (1) is done, we then have a parallel corpus of quintuples of the
>> form
>>
>> [audiovisual scene, English sentence, parse of sentence via link
>> grammar with learned dictionary, Lojban sentence, PLN-Atomese
>> interpretation of Lojban sentence]
>>
>> We can take the pairs
>>
>> [parse of sentence via link grammar with learned dictionary,
>> PLN-Atomese interpretation of Lojban sentence]
>>
>> from this corpus and use them as the input to a pattern mining process
>> (maybe a suitably restricted version of the OpenCog Pattern Miner,
>> maybe a specialized implementation), which will mine ImplicationLinks
>> serving the function of current RelEx2Logic rules.
>>
>> The above can be done for sentences about Basic Perceptions only, and
>> also for sentences about Second Stage Perceptions.
>>
>> NEXT STEPS FOR LANGUAGE LEARNING
>>
>> The link grammar dictionary learned as described above will have
>> limited scope.  However, it can potentially be used as the SEED for a
>> larger link grammar dictionary to be learned from unsupervised
>> analysis of a larger text corpus, for which nonlinguistic correlates
>> of the linguistic constructs are not available.   This will be a next
>> step of experimentation.
>>
>> NEXT STEPS FOR INTEGRATION
>>
>> Obviously, what can be done with simple perceptions can be done with
>> more complex perceptions as well … the assumption of simple
>> perceptions is because that’s what we have working or almost-working
>> right now… but Hanson Robotics will put significant effort into making
>> better visual perception for their robots, and as this becomes a
>> reality we will be able to use it within the above process..
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Ben Goertzel, PhD
>> http://goertzel.org
>>
>> Super-benevolent super-intelligence is the thought the Global Brain is
>> currently struggling to form...
>
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-- 
Ben Goertzel, PhD
http://goertzel.org

Super-benevolent super-intelligence is the thought the Global Brain is
currently struggling to form...

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