[agi] AI on TV

[maitri]

There was a show on the tube last night on TechTV.  It was part of their weekly Secret, Strange and True series.  They chronicled three guys who are working on creating advanced AI.    One guy was from Belgium.  My apologies to him if he reads this list, but he was a rather quirky and stressed character.  He had designed a computer that was basically a collection of chips.  He raised a million and had it built on spec.  I gather he was expecting something to miraculously emerge from this collection, but alas, nothing did.  It was really stressful watching his stress.  He had very high visibility in the country and the pressure was immense as he promised a lot.  I have real doubts about his approach, even though I am a lay-AI person.  Also, its clear from watching him that its sometimes good to have shoestring budgets and low visibility.  Less stress and more forced creativity in your approach...   The second guy was from either England or the states, not sure.  He was working out of his garage with his wife.  He was trying to develop robot AI including vision, speech, hearing and movement.  He was clearly floundering as he radically redesigned what he was doing probably a dozen times during the 1 hour show.  I think this experimentation has value.  But I really wonder if large scale trial and error will result in AGI.  I don't think so.  I think trial and error will, of course, be essential during development, but T and E of the entire underlying architecture seems a folly to me.  Since the problem is SO immense, I believe one must start with a very sound and detailed game plan that can be tweaked as things move along.   The last guy was brooks at MIT.  They were developing a robot with enhanced vision capabilities.  They also failed miserably.  I am rather glad that they did. They re funded by DOD, and are basically trying to build a robotic killing machine.  Just what we need.   It seems to me that trying to tackle the vision problem is too big of a place to start.  While all this work will have value down the line, is it essential to AGI?  It seems to me that building a strictly "black box" AGI that only uses text or graphical input\output can have tremendous implications for our society, even without arms and eyes and ears, etc.  Almost anything can be designed or contemplated within a computer, so the need for dealing with analog input seems unnecessary to me.  Eventually, these will be needed to have a complete, human like AI.  It may even be better that these first AGI systems will not have vision and hearing because it will make it more palatable and less threatening to the masses....   The show was rather discouraging, especially if one considers that these three folks are leading the way towards AGI.  As for me, I think others in the field are alot further along...Nonetheless, I'm sure the show will be rerun and may be a worthwhile watch for those here...   Kevin