Hi YKY, The problem is that right now I'm not joining Novamente because I have some
different AGI ideas that you may not be willing to accept. And I don't blame you for that. If I were to join NM, I'd like to make significant modifications to it, or at least branch out from yours and to explore my favorite ideas. And that, in the context of a conventional company, with the accountability to investors, etc, is just very unfeasible. Therefore I'm NOT blaming you.
Actually, for unpaid volunteers (working under non-D's) to fork the NM codebase in a different direction is not really problematic from NM's point of view. However, it may be problematic from the volunteers' point of view, because NM would still own the forked code. But if the forked code demonstrated superiority to the main branch, then the volunteers who created it would get a lot of NM options, and their forked branch would become the main branch! I don't think this is terribly likely to happen, but there are no psychological or organizational barriers to it on NM's side.
Yet if I were to join NM using mostly your AGI ideas, I'd feel very unhappy and also feel that I'm not doing my best. That why I'm trying to find a way out of this. You may find my ideas naive, but there's also inflexibility on your part. You may think you're just doing your business and you don't need to care about an external person pesting you, but that's not optimal.
I agree that the traditional corporate structure is not optimal. But I feel it's "good enough" to use as a vehicle for creating an AGI. The key thing is having a workable AGI design, not having the perfect organizational structure surrounding it. (Perfection and optimality are hard to come by in human systems, since we humans are so bloody imperfect!!) A business is always operating within a business landscape with other
competitors. It is really the job of a leader to deal with that landscape as a whole, not just the company itself.
Of course ... and NM's business path is all about trying to cope with the whole ecology of the modern biz world. We plan to proceed in large part via partnerships with other, more customer-focused firms, as evidenced by our current partnership with Electric Sheep Company. I really don't think competition among AI firms is a big problem at the moment. The market for AI is largely untapped and there is room for many players with solutions that have complementary strengths & weaknesses. At this stage, I feel, if any AI firm succeeds, it benefits all AI firms, by increasing the reputation and legitimacy of AI in the marketplace. In other words, if you cannot efficiently organize the "people", then those
who cannot find a place in your company, like me, would end up being your competitors, simply because they have nothing better to do. And that's a senseless waste of resource, among other things.
Well, if one of us becomes extremely successful biz-wise, but the other has made some deep AI success, the one can always buy the other's company ;-) -- Ben ----- 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
