Matt, Creation of human-level AGI will be the biggest achievement in the history of humanity...
The fact that it's taking groups of smart people decades to achieve, isn't terribly surprising, is it? It's a big problem and the societal rewards for applications of incremental progress are much greater than those for taking incremental progress and building it into more and more fundamental progress -- so for societal reasons, progress toward AGI is tending to occur diffusely spread across various applications.... But we are getting there, bit by bit... ;) -- Ben G On Thu, Oct 16, 2014 at 4:58 AM, Matt Mahoney via AGI <[email protected]> wrote: > 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/303/212726-deec6279 > Modify Your Subscription: > https://www.listbox.com/member/?&; > Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com > -- Ben Goertzel, PhD http://goertzel.org "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw ------------------------------------------- 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
