RE: [agi] Religion-free technical content & breaking the small hardware mindset
Mike Tintner wrote in his Wed 10/3/2007 6:22 PM post: "BUT THERE'S NO ONE REMOTELY CLOSE TO THE LEVEL, SAY, OF VON NEUMANN OR TURING, RIGHT? AND DO YOU REALLY THINK A REVOLUTION SUCH AS AGI IS GOING TO COME ABOUT WITHOUT THAT KIND OF REVOLUTIONARY, CREATIVE THINKER? JUST BY TWEAKING EXISTING SYSTEMS, AND INCREASING COMPUTER POWER AND COMPLEXITY? HAS ANY INTELLECTUAL REVOLUTION EVER HAPPENED THAT WAY?? " First, I would be very surprised if there are not quite a few people in these fields with IQs roughly as high as Turing and Von Neumann. I dont know exactly how many standard deviations they were above average, but the IQ bell curve is not going down. The evidence is its going up. Plus the percent of the worlds children who are receiving good educations is increasing all the time. So there should actually be more really brilliant thinkers now than in any imagined past age of supposed mental Titans. Of course, as technical and scientific fields develop there is less bold new fertile ground to be broken and fewer truly seminal ideas left to develop. My teenage son is into rock and roll. He bemoans that there isn't as much excitingly new music today as in the late sixties to mid-seventies. Thats because so much fertile conceptual musical ground was broken in those years, and, thus, there are fewer vast really new and yet satisfying expanses to explore. The same is true in AI, the field is over fifty years old. A lot of very valuable thinking was done in each of those five decades. People like Turing, Shannon, Minsky, Quillian, Simon, Newall, and Shank, to mention a very very few, have done some really good foundational work. So there is much less room for revolutionary breakthroughs. At this point I think synthesis, and large scale experimentation, and tweaking is probably required more than revolutionary breakthroughs. In fact, I think some people actually have a pretty good idea about how to achieve human level AGI, or at least something much closer to it. I don't want to sound like a one note piano, but take Novamente for example. Read the longer articles Ben Goertzel has written about it carefully several times and then try to open your mind to exactly what such a system could do if running on massive hardware and trained sufficiently well to have human level world knowledge. There is a lot of fertile ground to be plowed by getting systems of that type up and running on world-knowledge-computing-capable hardware with the proper training and then seeing where it gets us. My hunch is that with the right teams and the right, yes, tweaking, it will get us pretty damn far. And if it does not get us to truly human level AI, it will at least provide us with extremely powerful and valuable advances in computation, and -- more importantly to the issue of this post -- give us a much more clear understanding of the problems that have yet to be solved to actually get us there. I think we understand a lot about semantic meaning, generalized semantic representation, non-literal matching and invariant representation, goal systems and importance weighting, automatic learning, massively parallel and context and goal sensitive probabilistic inference, and the focusing of such inferences though mechanisms like intelligent parallel terraced scans, task specific learned search parameter tuning, dynamic search control feedback mechanisms, dynamic thresholding, accumulated prior activation, and consciousness, itself -- and many many more pieces of this fascinating, whiring, wizing, flashing, throbing, computational puzzle. Now is the time to start putting this stuff together in large systems and see who can be the first team to get it all to work together well. Deb Roy, is a very bright guy at the MIT media lab who is doing some really wild and crazy stuff. After a lecture he gave to a relatively small audience at MIT roughly two years ago, I went up to the lectern and told him I didnt see any brick walls between us and human level AI, that is, I didnt see any part of the AI problem that we dont already have reasonable approaches to. I asked him if him if he know of any. He answered with a smile I dont see any brick walls either The biggest brick wall is the small-hardware mindset that has been absolutely necessary for decades to get anything actually accomplished on the hardware of the day. But it has caused people to close their minds to the vast power of brain level hardware and the computational richness and complexity it allows, and has caused them, instead, to look for magic conceptual bullets that would allow them to achieve human-like AI on hardware that has roughly a millionth the computational, representational, and interconnect power of the human brain. Thats like trying to model New York City with a town of seven people. This problem has been compounded by the pressure for academic specialization and the pressure to produce demonstratable results on the type
Re: [agi] Religion-free technical content & breaking the small hardware mindset
On 10/4/07, Edward W. Porter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > The biggest brick wall is the small-hardware mindset that has been > absolutely necessary for decades to get anything actually accomplished on > the hardware of the day. But it has caused people to close their minds to > the vast power of brain level hardware and the computational richness and > complexity it allows, and has caused them, instead, to look for magic > conceptual bullets that would allow them to achieve human-like AI on > hardware that has roughly a millionth the computational, representational, > and interconnect power of the human brain. That's like trying to model New > York City with a town of seven people. This problem has been compounded by > the pressure for academic specialization and the pressure to produce > demonstratable results on the type of hardware most have had access to in > the past. Very well put! - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=49580536-91e968
Re: [agi] Religion-free technical content & breaking the small hardware mindset
On Wed, Oct 03, 2007 at 08:39:18PM -0400, Edward W. Porter wrote: > the > IQ bell curve is not going down. The evidence is its going up. So that's why us old folks 'r gettin' stupider as compared to them's young'uns. --linas - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=50669278-fabe77
RE: [agi] Religion-free technical content & breaking the small hardware mindset
It's also because the average person looses 10 points in IQ between mid twenties and mid fourties and another ten points between mid fourties and sixty. (Help! I'am 59.) But this is just the average. Some people hang on to their marbles as they age better than others. And knowledge gained with age can, to some extent, compensate for less raw computational power. The book in which I read this said they age norm IQ tests (presumably to keep from offending the people older than mid-forties who presumably largely control most of society's institutions, including the purchase of IQ tests.) Edward W. Porter Porter & Associates 24 String Bridge S12 Exeter, NH 03833 (617) 494-1722 Fax (617) 494-1822 [EMAIL PROTECTED] -Original Message- From: Linas Vepstas [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, October 05, 2007 7:31 PM To: agi@v2.listbox.com Subject: Re: [agi] Religion-free technical content & breaking the small hardware mindset On Wed, Oct 03, 2007 at 08:39:18PM -0400, Edward W. Porter wrote: > the > IQ bell curve is not going down. The evidence is its going up. So that's why us old folks 'r gettin' stupider as compared to them's young'uns. --linas - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?&; - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=50724257-8e390c
Re: [agi] Religion-free technical content & breaking the small hardware mindset
Edward W. Porter wrote: It's also because the average person looses 10 points in IQ between mid twenties and mid fourties and another ten points between mid fourties and sixty. (Help! I'am 59.) But this is just the average. Some people hang on to their marbles as they age better than others. And knowledge gained with age can, to some extent, compensate for less raw computational power. The book in which I read this said they age norm IQ tests (presumably to keep from offending the people older than mid-forties who presumably largely control most of society's institutions, including the purchase of IQ tests.) I disagree with your theory. I primarily see the IQ drop as a result of the Flynn effect, not the age. - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=50774160-ad0d02
RE: [agi] Religion-free technical content & breaking the small hardware mindset
Dear indefinite article, The Wikipedia entry for "Flynn Effect" suggests -- in agreement with your comment in the below post -- that older people (at least those in the pre-dementia years) don't get dumber with age relative to their younger selves, but rather relative to the increasing intelligence of people younger than themselves (and, thus, relative to re-normed IQ tests). Perhaps that is correct, but I can tell you that based on my own experience, my ability to recall things is much worse than it was twenty years ago. Furthermore, my ability to spend most of three or four nights in a row lying bed in most of the night with my head buzzing with concepts about an intellectual problem of interest without feeling like a total zombiod in the following days has substantially declined. Since most organs of the body diminish in function with age, it would be surprising if the brain didn't also. We live in the age of political correctness where it can be dangerous to ones careers to say anything unfavorable about any large group of people, particularly one as powerful as the over 45, who, to a large extent, rule the world. (Or even to those in the AARP, which is an extremely powerful lobby.) So I don't know how seriously I would take the statements that age doesn't affect IQ. My mother, who had the second highest IQ in her college class, was a great one for relaying choice tidbits. She once said that Christiaan Barnard, the first doctor to successfully perform a heart transplant, once said something to the effect of If you think old people look bad from the outside, you should see how bad they look from the inside. That would presumably also apply to our brains. Edward W. Porter Porter & Associates 24 String Bridge S12 Exeter, NH 03833 (617) 494-1722 Fax (617) 494-1822 [EMAIL PROTECTED] -Original Message- From: a [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, October 06, 2007 10:00 AM To: agi@v2.listbox.com Subject: Re: [agi] Religion-free technical content & breaking the small hardware mindset Edward W. Porter wrote: > It's also because the average person looses 10 points in IQ between > mid twenties and mid fourties and another ten points between mid > fourties and sixty. (Help! I'am 59.) > > But this is just the average. Some people hang on to their marbles as > they age better than others. And knowledge gained with age can, to > some extent, compensate for less raw computational power. > > The book in which I read this said they age norm IQ tests (presumably > to keep from offending the people older than mid-forties who > presumably largely control most of society's institutions, including > the purchase of IQ tests.) > > I disagree with your theory. I primarily see the IQ drop as a result of the Flynn effect, not the age. - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?&; - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=51303117-b7930f
Re: [agi] Religion-free technical content & breaking the small hardware mindset
With googling, I found that older people has lower IQ http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/05/060504082306.htm IMO, the brain is like a muscle, not an organ. IQ is said to be highly genetic, and the heritability increases with age. Perhaps that older people do not have much mental stimulation as young people? IMO, IQ does not measure general intelligence, and does not certainly measure common sense intelligence. The Bushmen and Pygmy peoples have an average IQ of 54. (source: http://www.rlynn.co.uk/) These IQs are much lower than some mentally retarded and down syndrome people, but the Bushmen and Pygmy peoples act very normal. Yes, IQ is a sensitive and controversial topic, particularly the racial differences in IQ. "my ability to recall things is much worse than it was twenty years ago" Commonly used culture-free IQ tests, such as Raven Progressive Matrices, generally measure visualspatial intelligence. It does not measure crystallized intelligence such as memory recall, but visualspatial fluid intelligence. I do not take IQ tests importantly. IQ only measures visualspatial reasoning, not auditory nor linguistic intelligence. Some mentally retarded autistic people have extremely high IQs. Edward W. Porter wrote: Dear indefinite article, The Wikipedia entry for "Flynn Effect" suggests -- in agreement with your comment in the below post -- that older people (at least those in the pre-dementia years) don't get dumber with age relative to their younger selves, but rather relative to the increasing intelligence of people younger than themselves (and, thus, relative to re-normed IQ tests). Perhaps that is correct, but I can tell you that based on my own experience, my ability to recall things is much worse than it was twenty years ago. Furthermore, my ability to spend most of three or four nights in a row lying bed in most of the night with my head buzzing with concepts about an intellectual problem of interest without feeling like a total zombiod in the following days has substantially declined. Since most organs of the body diminish in function with age, it would be surprising if the brain didn't also. We live in the age of political correctness where it can be dangerous to one’s careers to say anything unfavorable about any large group of people, particularly one as powerful as the over 45, who, to a large extent, rule the world. (Or even to those in the AARP, which is an extremely powerful lobby.) So I don't know how seriously I would take the statements that age doesn't affect IQ. My mother, who had the second highest IQ in her college class, was a great one for relaying choice tidbits. She once said that Christiaan Barnard, the first doctor to successfully perform a heart transplant, once said something to the effect of “If you think old people look bad from the outside, you should see how bad they look from the inside.” That would presumably also apply to our brains. - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=51643900-66a52b
RE: [agi] Religion-free technical content & breaking the small hardware mindset
I think IQ tests are an important measure, but they don't measure everything important. FDR was not nearly as bright as Richard Nixon, but he was probably a much better president. Ed Porter Original Message- From: a [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, October 09, 2007 4:19 PM To: agi@v2.listbox.com Subject: Re: [agi] Religion-free technical content & breaking the small hardware mindset With googling, I found that older people has lower IQ http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/05/060504082306.htm IMO, the brain is like a muscle, not an organ. IQ is said to be highly genetic, and the heritability increases with age. Perhaps that older people do not have much mental stimulation as young people? IMO, IQ does not measure general intelligence, and does not certainly measure common sense intelligence. The Bushmen and Pygmy peoples have an average IQ of 54. (source: http://www.rlynn.co.uk/) These IQs are much lower than some mentally retarded and down syndrome people, but the Bushmen and Pygmy peoples act very normal. Yes, IQ is a sensitive and controversial topic, particularly the racial differences in IQ. "my ability to recall things is much worse than it was twenty years ago" Commonly used culture-free IQ tests, such as Raven Progressive Matrices, generally measure visualspatial intelligence. It does not measure crystallized intelligence such as memory recall, but visualspatial fluid intelligence. I do not take IQ tests importantly. IQ only measures visualspatial reasoning, not auditory nor linguistic intelligence. Some mentally retarded autistic people have extremely high IQs. Edward W. Porter wrote: > > Dear indefinite article, > > The Wikipedia entry for "Flynn Effect" suggests -- in agreement with > your comment in the below post -- that older people (at least those in > the pre-dementia years) don't get dumber with age relative to their > younger selves, but rather relative to the increasing intelligence of > people younger than themselves (and, thus, relative to re-normed IQ > tests). > > Perhaps that is correct, but I can tell you that based on my own > experience, my ability to recall things is much worse than it was > twenty years ago. Furthermore, my ability to spend most of three or > four nights in a row lying bed in most of the night with my head > buzzing with concepts about an intellectual problem of interest > without feeling like a total zombiod in the following days has > substantially declined. > > Since most organs of the body diminish in function with age, it would > be surprising if the brain didn't also. > > We live in the age of political correctness where it can be dangerous > to ones careers to say anything unfavorable about any large group of > people, particularly one as powerful as the over 45, who, to a large > extent, rule the world. (Or even to those in the AARP, which is an > extremely powerful lobby.) So I don't know how seriously I would take > the statements that age doesn't affect IQ. > > My mother, who had the second highest IQ in her college class, was a > great one for relaying choice tidbits. She once said that Christiaan > Barnard, the first doctor to successfully perform a heart transplant, > once said something to the effect of > > If you think old people look bad from the outside, you > should see how bad they look from the inside. > > That would presumably also apply to our brains. > - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?&; - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=51654844-578b6d
