Reality is the best source to consult about reality. Why write a book about how to clean a house if your audience can just watch someone doing it, and ask appropriate questions when it gets stumped? And once a robot has learned a task, the information can be copied without further human demonstration. So maybe "programming" will eventually come to mean "demonstrating a task for a robot" and cease having anything to do with writing code.
On Mon, Jan 7, 2013 at 11:02 AM, Matt Mahoney <[email protected]>wrote: > On Sat, Jan 5, 2013 at 4:54 AM, Mike Tintner <[email protected]> > wrote: > > You've missed the whole point of AGI. An AGI (or sub-AGI) robot that > doesn't > > need to be reprogrammed for evernew tasks saves a fortune. > > Well, I have heard this before. In the 1950's IBM predicted that > FORTRAN would mean the "end of programming". It is true that the first > high-level language was a great advance. Instead of writing a sequence > of machine instructions for each type of computer, you could write > machine-independent mathematical expressions and the computer would > translate them to the underlying instruction set. Of course the result > was that we were able to write bigger programs for tasks that nobody > could even conceive of in the 1950's. > > AGI is not going to magically make programming go away either. The > availability of cheap, powerful computers, a faster internet, and big > data means that we can make advances in language, vision, robotics, > and other hard AI problems using algorithms that are already > understood to a large extent. This will enable us to solve more > complex problems using some natural language instruction and machine > learning in place of writing code, but not a reduction in overall > effort. Programming a robot to clean houses might involve something > like writing a book "How to clean a house - a guide for robots". Such > books probably exist for a human audience, but would not be useful > because the author probably assumes (correctly) you already know how > to hold a broom, tell if the floor needs sweeping, and a million other > common sense bits of data. Putting a human face on a robot does not > automatically imbue it with common sense. When speech recognition > systems were first developed, we were disappointed to learn that this > is not the same thing as language understanding. If it were, then you > would not still be annoyed when your phone call is answered by a > machine. "Press 1 or say 'yes'" is not an improvement over "press 1". > > The problem with common sense is that we don't know what we know. If > we did, then we could just suck it off the internet and we wouldn't > have to explicitly write it down because nobody bothers otherwise. > Even worse, we don't know how much we know. If we did, then Doug Lenat > would have been able to predict in 1984 when Cyc would be finished. It > isn't finished now, and still nobody knows just how big this knowledge > base needs to be. > > Cleaning a house is much more complex than any piece of software that > exists now. So are the other 100,000 jobs that people do, and the > million other hard-to-imagine jobs that might be created over the next > couple of decades. I suppose that these jobs share a lot of knowledge > that can be copied, but it is hard to say how much, or more > importantly, how much is not shared between them. > > -- > -- Matt Mahoney, [email protected] > > > ------------------------------------------- > AGI > Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now > RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/23050605-2da819ff > Modify Your Subscription: > https://www.listbox.com/member/?&; > Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com > ------------------------------------------- AGI Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/21088071-f452e424 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21088071&id_secret=21088071-58d57657 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
