Steve Richfield wrote:
To all,
Perhaps we can completely sidestep the countless contentious issues
regarding what intelligence is, what an AGI is, what consciousness is, what
is needed, etc., with an entirely different approach:
Perhaps we could create a short database (maybe only a dozen or so entries)
of sample queries, activities, tasks, etc., that YOU would like to see YOUR
future AGIs performing to earn their electricity. Perhaps this could pull us
out of the esoteric morass that recent postings have fallen into, and put us
back onto a track of real-world goals to design to.
Everyone here has heard my discussions as to how really simple programs can
solve certain classes of difficult problems stated in NL, which was my
own initial goal. Many have argued that this goal was WAY too simple to be
interesting in an AGI forum. OK, if that is indeed the case (and I have no
reason to believe that this is not the case), then how about some really
concrete examples of what others here expect from AGIs, beyond merely a
willingness to work for electricity instead of food.
Note in passing that intelligence alone does NOT assure success, as
otherwise we would all be rich and way too busy to spend time here on this
forum. Why does anyone here expect that intelligent machines will succeed
where intelligent men routinely fail? There seems to be a nearly religious
fervor here, perhaps to hide our own personal failures to apply our
intelligence to propel us to personal success. Is there anything at all
substantial here, or is this simply a society of mutual delusion?
Hopefully we will either get a good list from this thread, or it will become
obvious to everyone that AGIs are a wasted effort.
Please post *concrete* examples of useful activities that you hope that AGIs
(rather than humans) will be performing. Perhaps you can even think of
something that you would be doing if only you were smarter, which of course
would be the very best example. No, designing AGIs does NOT count, unless of
course you first exhibit some other non-circular value.
Jiri previously noted that perhaps AGIs would best be used to manage the
affairs of humans so that we can do as we please without bothering with the
complex details of life. Of course, people and some (communist) governments
now already perform this function, so while this might be a
potential application, it doesn't count for this posting, as I am looking
for things that people either can not do at all, or can not do adequately
well.
BTW, note that computers were first justified on the basis of their use in
weapons computations (e.g. trajectory tables) and simulations (e.g. atomic
weapons). Perhaps there is some similar niche for AGIs that is big enough to
fund their development?
Thanks in advance for your *concrete* examples.
Steve,
Some of the discussion on this list is about important questions such as
what is needed to achieve AGI. If you call that an "esoteric morass"
then frankly this might be a forum that is not for you.
However, in the spirit of positive engagement, I will answer some of
your questions.
An AGI is a generally intellgent system, so it would have the same
capabilities as a human intellect. These do not need to be listed.
The tasks that an AGI needs to be able to perform are, therefore, simply
all the tasks that any human intelligence is able to perform.
But beyond that, it would be capable of understanding itself, because
(unlike a human brain) its internal mechanisms will be (a) the result of
a planned design process, and (b) completely open to external probes.
This fact of its workings being open to inspection would mean that rapid
improvements could almost certainly be made as a result of watching the
system in regular operation. So, unlike a human brain, an AGI would
lead directly to the creation of faster, more efficient types of
intelligence, and as a result we could reasonably expect an AGI to lead
to much-greater-than-human levels of intelligence. An AGI working at
1000 times the speed of a human being would do in one year what that
human would have done in a thousand years (this calculation partially
depends on other factors that I will not go into here).
Also, unlike a human, the control system (motivations, emotions, drives)
of the AGI would be designable, and so could be made to lack the flaws
that obviously exist in the human mind. Mainly, this means that the
violently competitive motivations that were put into the brain [sic] by
evolution would to need to be present. This would result in Difference
Number 2: an AGI could be built in such a way as to be more trustworthy
than a human, possibly to the extent that it would be completely
empathic to the goals and aspirations of the human race. This would be
a big difference indeed.
Thirdly, an AGI would be able to engage in high-bandwidth communications
with other AGIs, and as a result it would be possible for a team of AGIs
to cooperate on a project in ways that humans cannot. Once again, this
is a massive improvement over the human case. A team of a few hundred
AGIs of human intelligence level could probably do what the entire
100,000-person NASA Apollo project did.
Lastly, in my very short list, if someone could build and train one AGI
to become an expert in some field, we could do something that is
completely impossible to do with a human being: instead of that
expertise withering away with the senility and death of the human brain,
the AGI knowledge could be poured into other AGI systems. So, one
world-class AGI-expert in nanotechnology, for example, would immediately
give us a thousand or a million such experts (depending only on our
ability to physically build copies of the hardware).
These are just the obvious possibilities. Others could be listed, but
they are hardly necessary.
In this context, asking what AGIs are good for is a little comical.
Richard Loosemore
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agi
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