Hi,
P.S. Ben, did you consider trying to invite Minsky to an AGI workshop? Certainly it's hard and perhaps not possible yet, but that would be a large advertisement for AGI.
Marvin Minsky was invited to the AGIRI workshop but elected not to attend. We did have a number of respected AI academics however, not only youngsters like Nick Cassimatis but old hands like Stan Franklin and Hugo de Garis. I believe the AGI meme is spreading through academia at an exponential rate, but the exponent is not that large. The number of AGI-ish workshops and journal issues is increasing each year. My prediction is that 10 years from now AGI will be a flourishing subfield of academic AI -- though maybe under some other name such as "Human-Level AI" rather than under the name AGI. (Of course, this may happen because of some mavericks on the fringe of, or totally outside of, the academic establishment making an AGI breakthrough that wakes up the academic AI establishment to the near-term possibilities!!) And, I agree with Luke's comment that in private many academic AI researchers are not so down on AGI as one might think. But in public, they need to publish papers and get grants, and AGI is not very good for that. I know that my own academic CV would probably look "Better" from a university point of view if I removed all AGI stuff from it and just sold myself as a bioinformatics and language processing expert!!! So, I think there is a fair bit of enthusiasm lurking under the surface among academic narrow-AI experts, and once AGI becomes a bit more legitimated within the community, a lot of folks will jump very eagerly on the bandwagon... -- Ben g ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
