The open source idea sounds great and in general I agree with this approach. One of the main benefits in my view is ensuring that powerful new technology does not fall into the hands of any single individual, company or nation who could then monopolise its use, potentially with unfriendly results. In the proprietary situation you're really putting all your eggs into one basket and just hoping that the first mover is somewhat benevolent.
But in practice it's difficult to do AI in an open source way, because I've found that at least up until the present there have been very few people who actually know anything about the algorithms involved and can make a useful contribution. The typical case is that there are a few folks who are enthusiastic but lack either the programming ability or the background knowledge of AI techniques, or both. Just learning about the history of AI in general so that you can recognise potential dead-end approaches takes some investment of time and energy. Another factor weighing against the open source approach is the lack of a well defined definition for an intelligent system. If you're writing a word processor or even an operating system you pretty much know in advance what it should do and roughly what the architecture of the program should look like. I think Linus Torvalds based his first version of linux on the description given in a book called "operating systems: theory and implementation" (or something like that). Unfortunately there are few implementable designs for an AGI described in sufficient detail to be able to divide the task up and allocate it amongst programmers. Ben's project may be an exception to this. On 11/05/07, Mike Tintner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Just been looking at the vids. of last year's AGI conference. One thing really hit me from the panel talk - and that was: but, of course, only open-source AGI will ever work. Sorry, but all these ideas of individual systems, produced by teams of - what? - say, twenty individuals at most - achieving some significant form of intelligence are, frankly, wild fantasies. We're talking re the human system about the most fabulously complex machine in the universe - and even a simple worm is mind-blowingly complex. Hey, a single cell is awesome. Not just complex as in "having many parts" but complicated as in "having many subsystems". If you stand back and look at AI/ AGI and robotics, as a whole, what you already have anyway is a de facto division of labour of the problem, however crude - different groups are, in fact, going for different aspects of the problem, Emotions, navigation, proprioception, vision, etc. etc. And, you have different roboticists tackling more or less every stage of evolution - with robots from worms and snakes to humanoids. The greatest challenge - and these are my first, very stumbling thoughts here - is to find ways that people can work together on the overall roblem - that all these systems (or subsystems) that people are working on can connect and evolve together. That's the only way that even an adaptive robotic worm [or equivalent] will be produced. (And a common systems/ common parts approach is after all that used by evolution itself). Open-source creativity is the defining model of creativity in this century. The Human Genome Project provided the template not just for biology but for human creativity. And actually, the real singularity - the greatest leap forward - in this century, long before any form of machine intelligence, will be the leap in human creativity that is coming. The last century was that of universal education, this will be the century of universal creativity. Of course, the problem was relatively easy to define for the Human Genome Project. Defining and carving up the problem of AGI so that many teams and the whole world can work on it jointly, is a huge challenge in itself. But it can be done. (Stan Franklin, for example, talked of the problem of just achieving a common ontology, or terminology for AGI, and yet, if you think about it, people ARE using a great deal of common terminology anyway) Ben, I imagine, more or less knows the open-source truth in talking about an AGI "Manhattan Project." But even that would be too small. The whole world - the whole Internet - will have to be involved.. ----- 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/?&;
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