Ben you said: <<I agree that a significant part of human conversation consists of rote memory, and reflexive << responses according to habitual communication patterns. To me, however, these are the least << interesting parts of human conversation.... And I'm not sure how far mimicking these parts of << human conversation gets you, in terms of emulating the other parts of human conversation, which << involve deeper thought.
While it is true that most bots today generate a reflexive response based only on the user's input, it is possible to extend bot technology by generating the response based upon the following additional internal stimuli not provided in the current input they are responding to. These stimuli provide at least a portion of the grounding I think you are referring to. 1. The bot's personality variables that model it's life circumstances and personal experience. Currently over 800 variables in my model. For instance a male may respond differently to the question "How old are you?" than a woman. A liberal would answer different than a conservative, etc... 2. The extraction of additional knowledge from each bot's input which adds to the internal knowledge base variable state simulating short term memory and providing context for the generation of a conditional response. If I say "I am a single man" then the bot's requests for information about me will not later include "Am I married" or "Are you a woman" in the response generation. Whereas Cyc starts out trying to model the universe with no way of integrating that model into human conversation (What I call a top down approach). A bot author using the above approach can generate the simple knowledge representation structures necessary to capture and incorporate the information content within a single human thought. What I view as a bottom up approach. While it is true that this still does not represent a true AGI at this point since the program is not yet defining it's own additional knowledge states and decision rules to base upon the states, a program such as this would have tremendous commercial value in both responding to and processing simple information requests. Gathering and passing request information upwards in those cases where it lacks the grounding to fulfill the request itself. When coupled with voice generation and speech recognition, help desks, customer service, order taking and fulfillment which make up a large segment of our work force would benefit just as robotics has freed our manufacturing work force from the most dull and repetitive manual labor. Bot technology has the potential to free these industries from the simplest and most repetitive information and service requests. Eventually the integration of bot technology and expert systems will raise the bar allowing the bot to make more complex decisions based upon existing expertise in specific knowledge domains. I also agree that the AGI approach of modeling and creating a self learning system is a valid bottom up approach to AGI. But it is much harder for me with my limited mathematical and conceptual knowledge of the research to grasp how and when these systems will be able jumpstart themselves and evolve to the point of communicating in English. I am sure I have not addressed above what you referred to as deeper thought. And while bot technology may end up being relegated as a dim witted servant if and when a true AGI bootstraps itself, I would be more than happy if bot technology had lived up to a portion of it's potential and freed more humans from menial work to work on those problems which do require deeper thought. ------- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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