> > Not exactly. It isn't that I think we should give up on AGI, but rather that > we should be consciously planning for it to take several decades to get > there. We should still tackle the problems in front of us, instead of giving > up on real AI work altogether. But we need to get past the idea that every > AI project should start from scratch and end up delivering a > human-equivalent AGI, because that isn't going to happen. We just aren't > that close yet. > > The way the software industry has solved big challenges in the past is to > break them up into sub-problems, figure out which sub-problems can be solved > right now, solve them as thoroughly as possible, and offer the resulting > solutions as black boxes that can then become inputs into the next round of > problem solving. That's what happened with operating systems, and > development environments, and database systems. If we want to see real > progress in AI, the same thing needs to happen to problems like NLP, > computer vision, memory, attention, etc. >
In as much as I'm a neurophile, I disagree that this is the best approach. AI research has been having a hard time making progress by working on little black boxes and then hooking them together. I think without the context of the whole entity (the top level AGI), it's harder to think about and implement solutions to the black box problems. Evolution certainly didn't work with black boxes. It made functionally complete organisms at each step of the way, and I think AI design can work in the same manner. The progress of bottom-up, whole organism roboticism, ala Rod Brooks, is an impressive example of what can happen when you attack the whole organism simultaneously. The top level thinking is grounded in the structure of the representations used by the lower level stuff that actually interacts with the world. Now this agrees with most of what you are saying, namely that we can't implement a cloud in the sky AGI that thinks in a vacuum. But it disagrees with you in saying that we can't afford to work on these sub-problems without the context of the entire organism. -Brad ------- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?[EMAIL PROTECTED]
