However, reading your papers & Ben's, it's becoming clear that there may well be an industry-wide bad practice going on here. You guys all focus on how your systems WORK... The first thing anyone trying to understand your or any other system must know is what does it DO? What are the problems it addresses, and the kinds of solutions it provides?
Hey Mike: What are the problems you address, and the kinds of solutions you provide? I could ask the same question about my 10 year old daughter ... or a newborn baby... My point is: an AGI system is by definition not restricted to a highly particular problem domain ... so the set of problems and solutions potentially addressable by any AGI system will be extremely broad.... Thinking in terms of incremental pathways to AGI, one may posit particular problem domains as targets for partial versions of one's AGI. But then there is a danger that people will see those "interim problem domains" and overgeneralize and believe that is what one's AGI system is all about. For instance, the first commercial manifestation of the Novamente AI Engine was the use of some of its learning routines inside the Biomind ArrayGenius product for gene expression microarray data analysis. So what? The next commercial manifestation may well be for controlling virtual pets operative within Second Life and/or other virtual worlds. Again, so what? This doesn't mean that Novamente is "basically a virtual pet controller" any more than it's "basically a bioinformatics analysis tool." Once the end goal of AGI is reached, AGI systems will be able to do anything humans can do plus way more. And what AGI systems happen to be used to do on the incremental pathway there, doesn't really tell you that much about the ultimate nature of the AGI systems. (Similarly, e.g., the early applications that the Internet was used for in the 1970's don't really tell you much about the ultimate nature of the Internet. They tell you something of course, but they leave a lot out, as anyone can see now....) -- 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/?member_id=231415&user_secret=fabd7936
