On 3/17/07, Ben Goertzel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
4) So, the question is not whether DARPA, M$ or Google will "enter the AI race" -- they are there. The question is whether they will adopt a workable approach and put money behind it. History shows that large organizations often fail to do so, even when workable approaches exist, allowing the disruptive innovations to be made by smaller organizations that are oriented toward taking bigger risks.
History may also show that the deep-pocket guys often steal the innovations and overtake the original inventors. In fact, it always happen when they *can*.
If you think more about it, such an important technology as AGI will not easily fall into your hands without some nasty competition. As soon as Novamente or some AGI projects show a little bit of real promise, the AGI approach will almost certainly be copied. M$ has shown time and again that they always wait for others to do the exploratory work and then enter the market when the tech is mature. IBM also stole the PC idea -- they actually had a secret operation to design their PC.
5) I don't want to get into arguments about my own personality and motivations, but I don't think anyone who knows me F2F would consider me "complacent" ;-) .... In fact I am frustrated at the Novamente project's relatively slow progress, and actively trying to solve this problem via bringing in funding to hire more staff. I am please to observe that our progress is exponentially accelerating, but frustrated that the exponent is not larger! I may be "complacent" in the sense that I think the Novamente AGI design is workable and doesn't need fundamental rethinking, though, if that's what you mean.
I think the Novamente design has many strong points (eg your uncertain logic seems to be more mathematically rigorous) but I think you still need to do something special to prepare for the competition scenario. "Failing to plan is planning to fail" -- Roman proverb. IMO you got to do something special that makes NM more likely to emerge as the winner in such a scenario.
6) I agree with you that there is more than one workable AGI design. But I still think that coming up with a workable AGI design is **hard problem**. It sure took me a long time. Once you get beyond the various conceptual mistakes that are endemic to the AI and cognitive science fields and really understand the nature of the problem, the hardest issues are computational resource efficiency, and complexity of parametric dependencies. Novamente is not ideal in these regards but it's much better than anything I came up with before, and IMO better than anything else I've read about.... But of course I don't know the details of other proprietary AGI designs.
Your AGI design may be at a more advanced stage than the others, but this can be overtaken later. That's why I point out that the critical thing is to recruit and utilize talented people in your organization -- which is even more important than developing *your* particular version of AGI. Let me stress again that there is nothing inherently wrong with your AGI. I'm talking about an organizational problem. YKY ----- 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/?list_id=303
