On 12/20/2007 07:56 PM,, Richard Loosemore wrote: > > I think these are some of the most sensible comments I have heard on this list for a while. You are not saying anything revolutionary, but it sure is nice to hear someone holding out for common sense for a change! > > Basically your point is that even if we just build an extremely fast version of a human mind, that would have astonishing repercussions.
Thanks. I agree that even if it could do nothing that humans cannot, it would have astonishing capabilities if it were just much faster. Von Neumann is an especially good example. He was not in the same class of creative genius as an Einstein or a Newton, but he was probably faster than the two of them combined, and perhaps still faster if you add in the rest of Einstein's IAS buddies as well. Pólya tells the following story: "There was a seminar for advanced students in Zürich that I was teaching and von Neumann was in the class. I came to a certain theorem, and I said it is not proved and it may be difficult. Von Neumann didn't say anything but after five minutes he raised his hand. When I called on him he went to the blackboard and proceeded to write down the proof. After that I was afraid of von Neumann" (How to Solve It, xv). Most of the things he is known for he did in collaboration. What you hear again and again that was unusual about his mind is that he had an astonishing memory, with recall reminiscent of Luria's S., and that he was astonishingly quick. There are many stories of people (brilliant people) bringing problems to him that they had been working on for months, and he would go from baseline up to their level of understanding in minutes and then rapidly go further along the path than they had been able to. But crucially, he went where they were going already, and where they would have gone if given months more time to work. I've heard it said that his mind was no different in character than that of the rest of us, just thousands of times faster and with near-perfect recall. This is contrasted with the mind of someone like Einstein, who didn't get to general relativity by being the fastest traveler going down a known and well-trodden path. How does this relate to AGI? Well, without even needing to posit hitherto undiscovered abilities, merely having the near-perfect memory that an AGI would have and thinking thousands of times faster than a base human gets you already to a von Neumann. And what would von Neumann have been if he had been thousands of times faster still? It's entirely possible that given enough speed, there is nothing solvable that could not be solved. (I don't mean to suggest that von Neumann was some kind of an idiot-savant who had no creative ability at all; obviously he was in a very small class of geniuses who touched most of the extant fields of his day in deep and far-reaching ways. But still, I think it's helpful to think of him as a kind of extreme lower bound on what AGI might be.) > > By saying that, you have addressed one of the big mistakes that people make when trying to think about an AGI: the mistake of assuming that it would have to Think Different in order to Think Better. In fact, it would only have to Think Faster. Yes, it isn't immortality, but living for a billion years would still be very different than living for 80. The difference between an astonishingly huge but incremental change and a change in kind is not so great. > The other significant mistake that people make is to think that it is possible to speculate about how an AGI would function without first having at least a reasonably clear idea about how minds in general are supposed to function. Why? Because too often you hear comments like "An AGI *would* probably do [x].....", when in fact the person speaking knows so little about about how minds (human or other) really work, that all they can really say is "I have a vague hunch that maybe an AGI might do [x], although I can't really say why it would...." > > I do not mean to personally criticise anyone for their lack of knowledge of minds, when I say this. What I do criticise is the lack of caution, as when someone says "it would" when they should say "there is a chance that it might" > > The problem is, that 90% of everthing said about AGIs on this list falls into that trap. > I agree that there seems to be overconfidence in the inevitability of things turning out the way it is hoped they will turn out, and lack of appreciation for the unknowns and the unknown unknowns. It's hardly unique to this list though to not recognize the contingent nature of things turning out the way they do. -joseph ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=78316106-039103
