To those doing AGI development: If, at the end of the development stage of your project -- say, after approximately five years -- you find that it has failed technically to the point that it is not salvageable, what do you think is most likely to have caused it? Let's exclude financial and management considerations from this discussion; and let's take for granted that a failure is just a learning opportunity for the next step.
Three possibilities seem viable: 1) The design is totally workable but just requires much more hardware than is currently available. (Our current estimates of hardware requirements for powerful Novamente AGI are back-of-the-envelope rather than rigorous calculations.) 2) The design proves unworkable. More specifically, there is one key aspect of the design that might fail, though I doubt it will. A key premise of the NM design is that the different learning/reasoning components can work together in such a way that each one of them helps the other one to adequately the combinatorial explosions intrinsic in its design. There are fairly strong theoretical reasons to believe this will work, but the hypothesis has so far only been tested in simple cases... 3) Teaching the system proves too time-consuming, because of the lack of the "inductive bias" that baby humans are born with. (I think we can work around this by using the logic-based nature of NOvamente's knowledge representation which will allow us to feed knowledge into Novamente's knowledge base directly, to serve as a highly rough analogue to a baby's inductive bias... but this is an untested speculation...) Much of my work the last couple years has been focused on minimizing risks 2 and 3, by simplifying and better understanding the design; and by working out the elements of a theory of AGI Developmental Psychology. Regarding Risk 1, I'm basically counting on the engineers of the world to keep accelerating hardware development and minimizing hardware cost.... The NM implementation is already pretty efficient due to the use of fairly hairy C++ code... -- Ben ----- 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]
