On Wed, Oct 15, 2014 at 1:04 AM, Piaget Modeler via AGI <[email protected]> wrote: > > So the internet is an AGI, is that your claim? > > Hmmm.... that's dubious.
What I find dubious is the idea that all we need to do is find the right algorithm for modeling human learning and then train it with human knowledge, and all our problems will be solved. Ben Goertzel has been working on this problem since 1997, first as Webmind, then Novamente, and now OpenCog. Doug Lenat thought it was just a matter of encoding common sense in structured form, and has been working on Cyc since 1984. Marvin Minsky and Ray Kurzweil spent decades on this problem starting in the 1960's, but have since scaled back their ambitions. Alan Turing described the approach in 1950, estimating it would be solved by 2000, requiring 10^9 bits of storage but without any need to increase processing speed. Yet here we are in 2014, still paying people $70 trillion per year to do work that machines aren't smart enough to do. It's not that we aren't making progress. In fact, world GDP is a lot higher than it would be if our economy weren't so dependent on the internet. Many jobs wouldn't even exist otherwise. We don't think of the internet as AGI because it doesn't pretend to be human. Never mind that it can answer far more questions than any human could, and a lot faster. The internet isn't intelligent as long as we take credit for creating and using it. Google isn't smart. It just makes everyone smarter. Given the enormous incentives to automate human labor, I'm not sure why we even want AGI. A lot of the development work in passing the Turing test goes into slowing down response time and inserting errors to make chatbots look more human (a problem Turing was aware of). Why would we even want to build practical machines with human weaknesses, like poor memory and arithmetic skills, emotions, or a need to take time off to sleep? So you're right. The internet is not AGI, even as it surpasses humans in knowledge, computing power, and every skill that is important to the economy. But I would keep an eye on it, just in case you were expecting AGI to arise somewhere else. -- -- Matt Mahoney, [email protected] ------------------------------------------- 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
