On Apr 6, 2008, at 8:46 AM, Ben Goertzel wrote:
Part of the issue is that the concepts underlying NM are both
complex and subtle, not lending themselves all that well to
"elevator pitch" treatment ... or even "PPT summary" treatment
(though there are summaries in both PPT and conference-paper
form).
If you think that's a mark against NM, consider this: What's your
elevator-pitch description of how the human brain works? How
about the human body? Businesspeople favor the simplistic, yet
the engineering of complex cognitive systems doesn't match well
with this bias....
Yes, and this happens far more often than just with AGI. Many venture
concepts, particularly speculative technology ventures, are extremely
difficult to package into an elevator pitch because the minimum amount
of material required for even the above average investor exceeds the
bandwidth of an elevator pitch or slide deck.
In my experience, this is best framed as a problem of education. More
education of the investor required before the pitch indicates an
exponential drop-off in the probability of being funded. One of the
reasons this is true is that not only does the person you are dealing
with need to be educated, they have to be able to successfully educate
*their* associates before investment is an option as a practical
matter. If the education required is complex and nuanced, this second
stage will almost certainly be a failure.
Ben already knows this, but I will elaborate for the peanut gallery
unfamiliar with venture finance. The trick to dealing with this
problem is to repackage the venture concept solely for the purpose of
minimizing the amount of education required to raise money, which in
the case of AGI means that you are selling a graspable product far
removed from AGI per se. The danger of this is that you end up going
down a road where there is no AGI left in the venture. Investors need
to be able to wrap their heads around the venture (any venture), which
given their limited resources means that the person with the idea
needs to frame the desired result in terms that require the very
minimum of education on the part of the investor to be compelling.
People invest in products, not ideas, and the products must be
concrete and obvious. For something like AGI, packaging the
technology into a fundable venture is an extraordinarily difficult task.
I would go as far as to say that funding speculative technology
ventures is largely a problem of eliminating the apparent amount of
education required so that it no longer appears particularly
speculative but instead "obvious" when no concrete example exists.
Successfully doing this is far, far more difficult than I suspect most
people who have not tried believe.
J. Andrew Rogers
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singularity
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