This response will cover points raised by several previous posts in the emergence/agenda/structure of mind threads, by Goertzel, Hall, Wallace, etc.
What makes an intelligence "general", to the extent that is possible, is that it does the right thing on new tasks or new situations, which it hadn't seen before. That's not going to happen unless the system is built in a very constrained way to respond to previous situations, say by being produced by very compact (or constrained) code. If you just keep adding new modules or features for each new task, you may solve that task, but you won't solve generalizations. This is the problem with Wallace's complaints. You actually want the "machine [to do] something unpredicted", namely the right thing in unpredicted circumstances. Its true that its hard and expensive to engineer/find an underlying compact explanation, but it is precisely the fact that this very constrained/compact underlying program is so improbable that makes it work! The arguments for its working in fact *rest exactly* on the fact that it is so improbable, it wouldn't exist unless it generalized to new experiences. So while its hard to engineer this, which might be called emergence, you will IMO be forced to if you want to succeed. That is the reason why AGI is hard. As has been pointed out in this thread (I believe by Goertzel and Hall) Minsky's approach in Society of Mind et seq of adding large numbers of systems then begs the question: how will these things ever work together, and why should the system generalize? I criticized it from this point of view in What is Thought? One way to try to handle the organization then is an economic framework. Hayek doesn't directly scale from random start to an AGI architecture in as much as the learning is too slow. But the same is true of any other means of EC or learning that doesn't start with some huge head start. It seems entirely reasonable to merge a Hayek like architecture with scaffolds and hand-coded chunks and other stuff (maybe whatever is in Novamente) to get it a head start. An advantage of having the economic system then is to impose coherence and constrainedness-- parts that don't in fact work effectively with others will be seen to be dying, forcing you to fix the problems. Without the economic discipline, you are likely to have subsystems (and sub-subsystems) you think are positive but are failing in some way through interaction effects. The brain was not developed exactly through a Hayek system, but that doesn't mean it does not exploit one (for example, mediated by endorphins or whatever) nor that one might not be very useful to impose on an AGI. ----- 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
