Re: Pei Wang's thoughts on AGI funding...
3 is a non empty set
----- Original Message ----
From: Ben Goertzel ben@goertzel.org
To: J. Epstein jeeproject@yahoo.com
Sent: Friday, April 18, 2008 1:17:26 PM
Subject: Pei Wang's thoughts on AGI funding...
Potentially relevant ;-)
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Pei Wang mail.peiwang@gmail.com
Date: Fri, Apr 18, 2008 at 1:01 PM
Subject: [agi] The Strange Loop of AGI Funding: now logically proved!
To: agi@v2.listbox.com
PREMISES:
(1) AGI is one of the most complicated problem in the history of
science, and therefore requires substantial funding for it to happen.
(2) Since all previous attempts failed, investors and funding agencies
have enough reason to wait until a recognizable breakthrough to put
their money in.
(3) Since the people who have the money are usually not AGI
researchers (so won't read papers and books), a breakthrough becomes
recognizable to them only by impressive demos.
(4) If the system is really general-purpose, then if it can give an
impressive demo on one problem, it should be able to solve all kinds
of problems to roughly the same level.
(5) If a system already can solve all kinds of problems, then the
research has mostly finished, and won't need funding anymore.
CONCLUSION: AGI research will get funding when and only when the
funding is no longer needed anymore.
Q.E.D. :-(
Pei
agi
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Ben Goertzel, PhD
CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC
Director of Research, SIAI
ben@goertzel.org
"If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they
will surely become worms."
-- Henry Miller
A few more thoughts...
I think it will be an interesting (but essential) challenge to try and
get, say, 5-10 really serious, ambitious, creative AI thinkers to
agree on a common AI architecture to pursue in a Brooklyn Project type
setting
One has to pick the right group -- a group of diverse individualistic
deep-thinkers, who nevertheless are willing to deeply comprehend each
others' ideas and work on a common framework together
One thing that stuck out at the 2006 AGI Workshop and AGI-08
conference, was the commonality between for instance
-- my Novamente approach
-- Nick Cassimatis's Polyscheme system
-- Stan Franklin's LIDA approach
-- Sam Adams (IBM) Joshua Blue
-- Alexei Samsonovich's BICA architecture
Not that these are all the same design ... there are real differences
.. but there are also a lot of deep parallels. Novamente seems to
be more fully fleshed out than these overall, but each of these guys
has thought through specific aspects more deeply than I have.
Also, John Laird (SOAR creator) is moving SOAR in a direction that's a
lot closer to the Goertzel/Cassimatis/Franklin/Adams style system than
his prior approaches ...
All the above approaches are
-- integrative, involving multiple separate components tightly bound
together in a high-level cognitive architecture
-- reliant to some extent on formal inference (along with subsymbolic methods)
-- clearly testable/developable in a virtual worlds setting
I would bet that with appropriate incentives all of the above
researchers could be persuaded to collaborate on a common AI project
-- without it degenerating into some kind of useless
committee-think...
Let's call these approaches LIVE, for short -- Logic-incorporating,
Integrative, Virtually Embodied
On the other hand, when you look at
-- Pei Wang's approach, which is interesting but is fundamentally
committed to a very eccentric form of uncertain logic that no one else
accepts
-- Selmer Bringsjord's approach, which is founded on the notion that
standard predicate logic alone is The Answer
-- Hugo de Garis's approach which is based on brain emulation
you're looking at interesting approaches that are not really
compatible with the LIVE approach ... I'd say, you could not viably
bring these guys into a collaborative AI project based on the LIVE
approach...
So, to me it's not about finding the World's Best AI Researchers.
That would be apropos if one were trying to make an Institute for
Advanced Study for AI research ... which would be cool, but different
from an AI Manhattan Project...
Instead, it's about finding a team of world-class AI researchers who
have enough commonality of vision regarding human-level AI to
fundamentally work together on a common design that they all believe
in ... and then giving this team a great software engineering team to
implement, test and tune their ideas, iteratively over a period of
years.
-- Ben
On Fri, Apr 18, 2008 at 5:01 PM, J. Epstein jeeproject@yahoo.com wrote:
3 is a non empty set
----- Original Message ----
From: Ben Goertzel ben@goertzel.org
To: J. Epstein jeeproject@yahoo.com
Sent: Friday, April 18, 2008 1:17:26 PM
Subject: Pei Wang's thoughts on AGI funding...Potentially relevant ;-)
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Pei Wang mail.peiwang@gmail.com
Date: Fri, Apr 18, 2008 at 1:01 PM
Subject: [agi] The Strange Loop of AGI Funding: now logically proved!
To: agi@v2.listbox.comPREMISES:
(1) AGI is one of the most complicated problem in the history of
science, and therefore requires substantial funding for it to happen.(2) Since all previous attempts failed, investors and funding agencies
have enough reason to wait until a recognizable breakthrough to put
their money in.(3) Since the people who have the money are usually not AGI
researchers (so won't read papers and books), a breakthrough becomes
recognizable to them only by impressive demos.(4) If the system is really general-purpose, then if it can give an
impressive demo on one problem, it should be able to solve all kinds
of problems to roughly the same level.(5) If a system already can solve all kinds of problems, then the
research has mostly finished, and won't need funding anymore.CONCLUSION: AGI research will get funding when and only when the
funding is no longer needed anymore.Q.E.D. :-(
Pei
agi
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Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com--
Ben Goertzel, PhD
CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC
Director of Research, SIAI
ben@goertzel.org"If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they
will surely become worms."
-- Henry Miller
--
Ben Goertzel, PhD
CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC
Director of Research, SIAI
ben@goertzel.org
"If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they
will surely become worms."
-- Henry Miller
to push the envelope. how many promising ones.. lets assume we had four-five teams. competing. each team funded. not fair that we choose the teams , but ..a start. its not fantasy football but i can envision now that ther is a ton of money in the charity world with no creative idea
----- Original Message ----
From: Ben Goertzel ben@goertzel.org
To: J. Epstein jeeproject@yahoo.com
Sent: Friday, April 18, 2008 5:44:50 PM
Subject: Re: Pei Wang's thoughts on AGI funding...
A few more thoughts...
I think it will be an interesting (but essential) challenge to try and
get, say, 5-10 really serious, ambitious, creative AI thinkers to
agree on a common AI architecture to pursue in a Brooklyn Project type
setting
One has to pick the right group -- a group of diverse individualistic
deep-thinkers, who nevertheless are willing to deeply comprehend each
others' ideas and work on a common framework together
One thing that stuck out at the 2006 AGI Workshop and AGI-08
conference, was the commonality between for instance
-- my Novamente approach
-- Nick Cassimatis's Polyscheme system
-- Stan Franklin's LIDA approach
-- Sam Adams (IBM) Joshua Blue
-- Alexei Samsonovich's BICA architecture
Not that these are all the same design ... there are real differences
... but there are also a lot of deep parallels. Novamente seems to
be more fully fleshed out than these overall, but each of these guys
has thought through specific aspects more deeply than I have.
Also, John Laird (SOAR creator) is moving SOAR in a direction that's a
lot closer to the Goertzel/Cassimatis/Franklin/Adams style system than
his prior approaches ...
All the above approaches are
-- integrative, involving multiple separate components tightly bound
together in a high-level cognitive architecture
-- reliant to some extent on formal inference (along with subsymbolic methods)
-- clearly testable/developable in a virtual worlds setting
I would bet that with appropriate incentives all of the above
researchers could be persuaded to collaborate on a common AI project
-- without it degenerating into some kind of useless
committee-think...
Let's call these approaches LIVE, for short -- Logic-incorporating,
Integrative, Virtually Embodied
On the other hand, when you look at
-- Pei Wang's approach, which is interesting but is fundamentally
committed to a very eccentric form of uncertain logic that no one else
accepts
-- Selmer Bringsjord's approach, which is founded on the notion that
standard predicate logic alone is The Answer
-- Hugo de Garis's approach which is based on brain emulation
you're looking at interesting approaches that are not really
compatible with the LIVE approach ... I'd say, you could not viably
bring these guys into a collaborative AI project based on the LIVE
approach...
So, to me it's not about finding the World's Best AI Researchers.
That would be apropos if one were trying to make an Institute for
Advanced Study for AI research ... which would be cool, but different
from an AI Manhattan Project...
Instead, it's about finding a team of world-class AI researchers who
have enough commonality of vision regarding human-level AI to
fundamentally work together on a common design that they all believe
in ... and then giving this team a great software engineering team to
implement, test and tune their ideas, iteratively over a period of
years.
-- Ben
On Fri, Apr 18, 2008 at 5:01 PM, J. Epstein jeeproject@yahoo.com wrote:
3 is a non empty set
----- Original Message ----
From: Ben Goertzel ben@goertzel.org
To: J. Epstein jeeproject@yahoo.com
Sent: Friday, April 18, 2008 1:17:26 PM
Subject: Pei Wang's thoughts on AGI funding...Potentially relevant ;-)
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Pei Wang mail.peiwang@gmail.com
Date: Fri, Apr 18, 2008 at 1:01 PM
Subject: [agi] The Strange Loop of AGI Funding: now logically proved!
To: agi@v2.listbox.comPREMISES:
(1) AGI is one of the most complicated problem in the history of
science, and therefore requires substantial funding for it to happen.(2) Since all previous attempts failed, investors and funding agencies
have enough reason to wait until a recognizable breakthrough to put
their money in.(3) Since the people who have the money are usually not AGI
researchers (so won't read papers and books), a breakthrough becomes
recognizable to them only by impressive demos.(4) If the system is really general-purpose, then if it can give an
impressive demo on one problem, it should be able to solve all kinds
of problems to roughly the same level.(5) If a system already can solve all kinds of problems, then the
research has mostly finished, and won't need funding anymore.CONCLUSION: AGI research will get funding when and only when the
funding is no longer needed anymore.Q.E.D. :-(
Pei
agi
Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now
RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/
Modify Your Subscription:
http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=212726&id_secret=101455437-4afee8
Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com--
Ben Goertzel, PhD
CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC
Director of Research, SIAI
ben@goertzel.org"If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they
will surely become worms."
-- Henry Miller
--
Ben Goertzel, PhD
CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC
Director of Research, SIAI
ben@goertzel.org
"If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they
will surely become worms."
-- Henry Miller
On Fri, Apr 18, 2008 at 7:51 PM, J. Epstein jeeproject@yahoo.com wrote:
to push the envelope. how many promising ones.. lets assume we had four-five teams. competing. each team funded. not fair that we choose the teams , but ..a start.
"4 or 5 teams" is unclear ... do we want teams w/in a single paradigm,
or teams representing
separate paradigms?
I can think of several quite distinct and fairly common AGI paradigms
off the bat:
Intensely integrative and probabilistic-logic-incorporating ... what I
just called LIVE in the prior email...
Brain emulation a la Markram, Hugo de Garis, Artificial Development
Predicate logic centric: Cyc, TexAI, Selmer Bringsjord
Robotics-centric: Solve vision and actuation first, then move on to
cognition... Rodney Brooks, Hans Moravec, etc.
Within each of these paradigms, there are multiple approaches and
could be multiple teams. OTOH, within each one,
there is at least potential for common ground among researchers, and
the possibility for collaboration
on a single project. Whereas, cross-paradigm, there is opportunity
for co-inspiration but not
really collaboration...
its not fantasy football but i can envision now that ther is a ton of money in the charity world with no creative idea
True ... but AI seems oddly unappealing to the philanthropists of the world.
Life extension (a la Methuselah Foundation) seems more appealing to
these folks, as it combines scientific value with touchy-feely human
values ... and of course most of the philanthropists wouldn't mind
living forever themselves...
My friend Tom Munnecke
is extremely well connected in the philanthropy community btw ... he
used to work w/ the Omidyars... so I have talked to him about these
issues...
I am baffled that Bill Gates has not yet funded a massive AI R&D
effort. M$'s in-house AI work is quite conservative and boring,
though they have some brilliant folks on staff. Paul Allen has done
some AI funding but has made surprisingly disastrous choices...
ben
Actually this
Robotics-centric: Solve vision and actuation first, then move on to
cognition... Rodney Brooks, Hans Moravec, etc.
must be decomposed into
4a) probabilistic robotics centric, e.g. Sebastian Thrun / Hans Moravec style
4b) subsumption robotics, e.g. Rodney Brooks style
These two camps don't talk much...
My own AGI approach meshes really nicely with 4a, not so much with 4b
(though I like that stuff too)
ben