Joshua Fox wrote:
I'd like to raise a FAQ: Why is so little AGI research and development
being done?
The answers of Goertzel, Moravec, Kurzweil, Voss, and others all agree
on this (no need to repeat them here), and I've read Are We Spiritual
Machines, but I come away unsatisfied. (Still, if there is nothing more
to say on this question, please do the AGIRI-equivalent of sniping this
thread immediately.)
I respect existing AGI researchers, but I am surprised that more members
of the "establishment" are not on board. I just can't believe that , for
example, almost all leading computer-science/cognitive-science
professors are herd-following closed-minded stuck-in-the-muds. The
leading universities do have their share of creative, free-thinking,
inquisitive people, and the same goes for other parts of the
"establishment".
To clarify what I am looking for, I should describe a recent
conversation. I spoke to an open-minded and intelligent friend who has a
PhD from, and does research in, a top university. The research is in
exactly the sort of technologies used in brain-scanning. I asked him
about Kurzweil's trends on the accelerating advance of
human-brain-scanning technologies. He did not agree with Kurzweil's
conclusions, and explained why.
Likewise, I'm looking for input from a open-minded, intelligent,
computer/cognitive scientist (who does not strongly support AGI
research) on the above question. I don't know where to find them, so
perhaps someone on this list could role-play one.
What would s/he say if I asked "Why do you not pursue or support AGI
research? Even if you believe that implementation is a long way off,
surely academia can study, and has studied for thousands of years,
impractical but interesting pie-in-the-sky topics, including human
cognition? And AGI, if nothing else, models (however partially and
imperfectly with our contemporary technology) essential aspects of some
philosophically very important problems."
I think the simple answer (all I got time for now :-)) is twofold:
1) If you ask why Kurzweil's ideas are not immediately infectious, it is
because his claims (and all singularity claims) are not just a few steps
beyond the current state of the art, they *look* like a wild leap into
the realms of speculation. Not much to be done about this: slowly,
over the next few years, it will become mor respectable, and then one
day you will wake up to find every researcher on the planet trying to
get grants in the new "singularity" field-cum-bandwagon.
2) Researchers need small, biteable, 6-months-to-publishable-paper
projects to get their teeth into. They would say that their Narrow-AI
research projects ARE the biteable chunks for today that will lead to
AGI tomorrow. Why do they do this? Because the people higher up from
them will crucify them if their work starts to get oriented towards
anything else but high publication rate in "respectable" journals ...
don't do this, and they will start to find promotions slipping, or
they'll just be dumped. Short term results pressure in other words.
Richard Loosemore.
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