Engineering General Intelligence -- book finally ready! (see attached)
Hi Jeffrey,
Hope you're doing well! ...
Yesterday I finally sent the draft of my big fat book on "how to build AGI" to Springer (it will be published by a collaboration of Springer & Atlantis Press, the latter a small academic press that has a "Thinking Machines" series...)...
The book is attached in PDF form.... It will look a little different after publisher formatting and proofreading and so forth, of course, but the basic ideas are all here.... Volume Two is the meat of it (and the longer part); Volume One sets the stage but may be mainly stuff you know already....
You have seen various earlier versions of this over the years, of course...
I am thankful for your help over the years that has enabled me to formulate the AGI design, architecture and theory ideas contained in this book !!
(Of course the book is at a fairly high level of abstraction and doesn't touch most of the detailed work I've done on various aspects of the design, but that's the way it goes...)
I am not entirely happy with the book as a literary construct --- I'm a better writer than this book demonstrates.... However, I'm sick of delaying the book and don't want to put it off longer in order to improve the style or presentation. The important thing is that the ideas are solid. This is the first book ever to really go through, in moderate detail, how to build a whole thinking machine -- rather than just giving a broad evocative overview (like Minsky's works), or digging into one aspect and then saying the other aspects will be figured out later....
If you're too impatient to read the whole thing, I'd suggest you start with the FINAL two chapters of PART TWO. Given that you've heard a lot about my ideas and work already, and read bits and pieces before, I think you'll be able to grok these fairly well. These chapters attempt to give a concrete sense and explanation for how all the parts fit together....
(The OpenCog R&D work in Hong Kong is ongoing; my proposed robotics work w/ David Hanson hasn't really gotten off the ground yet in a serious way, but I've been talking to David about it a lot, and he is
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hoping to relocate here in December, which would enable us to collaborate more seriously... we'll see ;) ...
Yours,
Ben
--
Ben Goertzel, PhD
http://goertzel.org
"My humanity is a constant self-overcoming" -- Friedrich Nietzsche
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