On 6/2/07, Mark Waser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> Yes, I believe there're people capable of producing income-generating stuff in the interim. I can't predict how the project would evolve, but am optimistic. Ask Ben about how much that affects a project . . . .
The need to create commercial products in the interim stages of an AGI project places a tremendous burden and constraint on the project. This should be pretty obvious. As an analogue, consider quantum computing. 10 years ago, as a commercial enterprise, it was a total non-starter. Now there are some commercial QC companies springing up, but they're pretty much just spending investment $$, not bringing in revenue from products. Only once QC is a lot more mature will it be possible to bring in revenue from incremental developments in the course of research. This doesn't mean QC is bullshit. It just means it is at an R&D phase rather than a productization phase. I think that AGI is somewhat similar to QC in this regard. But what is misleading is that AGI systems may share some technology components with narrow-AI systems, which are indeed (in many cases) incrementally monetizable in incremental stages. Now, here is what happened with Novamente. We spent 5-6 years of slow part-time development, designing and building our system. And now, finally, we are at a point where we can generate revenue from ongoing incremental improvements of the system. Now we have a system that can useful control learning agents in 3D virtual worlds, which is a viable business market. And as we make the system smarter and smarter over the coming years, we will be able to monetize the improved versions via launching more and more useful virtual agents. So, I think we can now make the "fund AGI R&D via profits gained from monetization of incrementally improving system versions" model work. But if so, it is only because a) we found a business niche that fits our AGI design and its early-stage capabilities, and is also a "hot market" b) ***we put in a whole bunch of time doing pure R&D work first*** ... funding it mostly via (very modest) profits from narrow-AI consulting work; and also a tiny amount of investment money -- 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=e9e40a7e
