On Sun, Apr 6, 2008 at 12:21 PM, Eric B. Ramsay <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Ben: > I may be mistaken, but it seems to me that AGI today in 2008 is "in the air" > again after 50 years.
Yes >You are not trying to present a completely novel and > unheard of idea and with today's crowd of sophisticated angel investors I am > surprised that no one bites given the modest sums involved. BTW I was not > trying to give needless advice, just finishing my thoughts. I already took > it as a given that you look for funding. I am trying to understand why no > one bites. It's not as if there are a hundred different AGI efforts out > there to choose from. I don't fully understand it myself, but it's a fact. To be clear: I understand why VC's and big companies don't want to fund NM. VC's are in a different sort of business ... and big companies are either focused on the short term, or else have their own research groups who don't want a bunch of upstart outsiders to get their research $$ ... But what vexes me a bit is that none of the many wealthy futurists out there have been interested in funding NM extensively, either on an angel investment basis, or on a pure nonprofit donation basis (and we have considered doing NM as a nonprofit before, though right now that's not our focus as the virtual-pets biz opp seems so grand...) I know personally (and have met with) a number of folks who -- could invest a couple million $$ in NM without it impacting their lives at all -- are deeply into the Singularity and AGI and related concepts -- appear to personally like and respect me and other in the NM team But, after spending about 1.5 years courting these sorts of folks, Bruce and I largely gave up and decided to focus on other avenues. I have some psychocultural theories as to why things are this way, but nothing too solid... >I am surprised that the reason may only be that the > project isn't far enough along (too immature) given the historical > precedents of what investors have ponied up money for before. That's surely part of it ... but investors have put big $$ into much LESS mature projects in areas such as nanotech and quantum computing. AGI arouses an irrational amount of skepticism, compared to these other futurist technologies, it seems to me. I suppose this partly is because there have been more "false starts" toward AI in the past. -- Ben ------------------------------------------- singularity Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/11983/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/11983/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=4007604&id_secret=98631122-712fa4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
