Benjamin Johnston wrote:
I have stuck my neck out and written an Open Letter to AGI (Artificial
General Intelligence) Investors on my website at http://susaro.com.
All part of a campaign to get this field jumpstarted.
Next week I am going to put up a road map for my own development project.
Hi Richard,
If I were a potential investor, I don't think I'd find your letter
convincing.
AI was first coined some 50 years ago: before I was born, and therefore
long before I entered the field of AI. Naturally, I can't speak with
personal experience on the matter, but when I read the early literature
on AI or when I read about field's pioneers reminiscing on the early
days, I get the distinct impression that this was an incredibly
passionate and excited group. I would feel comfortable calling them a
"gang of hot-headed revolutionaries" - even today, 50 years after
inventing the term "AI" and at the age of 80, McCarthy writes about AI
and the possibility of strong AI with passion and excitement. Yet, in
spite of all the hype, excitement and investment that was apparently
around during that time (or, more likely, as a result of the hype and
excitement) the field crashed in the "AI winter" of the 80s without
finding that "dramatic breakthrough".
There's the Japanese Fifth Generation Computer Systems project that I
understand to be a massive billion dollar investment during the 80s into
parallel machines and artificial intelligence; an "investment" that is
today largely considered to be a huge failure.
And of course, there's Cyc; formed with an inspiring aim to capture all
commonsense knowledge, but still remains in development some 20 years
later.
And in addition to these, there are the many many early research papers
on AI problem solving systems that show early promise and cause the
authors to make wild predictions and claims in their "Future Work"...
predictions that time has reliably proven to be false.
So, why would I want to invest now? When I track down the biographies of
several of the regulars on this list, I find that they entered the field
during or after the AI Winter and never experienced the early optimism
as an "insider". How can you convince an investor that the passion today
isn't just the unfounded optimism of researchers who don't remember the
past? How can you convince an investor that AGI isn't also going to
devolve again into an emphasis on publications rather than quality (as
you claim AI has devolved) or into a new kind of "weak AGI" with no
"dramatic breakthrough"?
I think a better argument would be to point to a fundamental
technological or methodological change that makes AGI finally credible.
I'm not convinced that being "lean, mean, hungry and hellbent on getting
results" is enough. If I believe in AGI, maybe my best bet is to invest
my money elsewhere and wait until the fundamental attitudes have changed
so each dollar will have a bigger impact, rather than squandered on a
bad dead-end idea. Alternately, my best bet may be to invest in weak AI
because it will give me a short-term profit (that can be reinvested) AND
has a plausible case for eventually developing into strong AI. If you
can offer no good reason to invest in AGI today (given all its past
failures), aside from a renewed passion of its researchers, then a sane
reader would have to conclude that AGI is probably a bad investment.
Personally, I'm not sure what I feel about AGI (though, I wouldn't be
here if I didn't think it was valuable and promising). However, in this
email I'm trying to play the "devil's advocate" in response to your open
letter to investors.
Ben,
Thanks for the thoughtful comments.
I have three responses.
First, I think there is a world of difference between passionate
researchers at the beginning of the field, in 1956, and passionate
researchers in 2008 who have a half-century of other people's mistakes
to learn from. The secret of success is to try and fail, then to try
again with a fresh outlook. That exactly fits the new AGI crowd.
Second, when you say that "a better argument would be to point to a
fundamental technological or methodological change that makes AGI
finally credible" I must say that I could not agree more. That is
*exactly* what I have tried to do in my project, because I have pointed
out a problem with the way that old-style AI has been carried out, and
that problem is capable of neatly explaining why the early optimism
produced nothing. I have also suggested a solution to that problem,
pointed out that the solution has never been tried before (so it has the
virtue of not being a failure yet!), and also pointed out that the
proposed solution resembles some previous approaches that did have
sporadic, spectacular success (the early work in connectionism).
However, in my Open Letter post, I did not want to emphasize my own work
(I will do that elsewhere on the website), but instead point out some
general facts about all AGI projects. Perhaps I should have also said
"And I have an approach that is dramatically new....", but I felt that
that that would have weakened the points that I was tryingt to make.
Finally, I do have to point out that you made no comment on the second
part of the post, where I explained that *any* investor who put money
into any project in the AGI arena would be injecting a shot of adrenalin
into the whole field, causing it to attract attention and so stimulate
further investment. That is a very important point: in any other field
of investment the last thing you want to do is to provoke other
investors into funding rivals to your own investment, but in AGI nothing
could be better. If that shot of adrenalin into the AGI field caused
one of the projects to succeed, the result would be a massive technology
surge that would benefit everyone, not just the individual investor.
There is no other investment opportunity where so much "trickle-down"
could be generated by the success of one company.
That argument lessens the risk of the investor's money being wasted.
As for investing in the other things (weak AI, etc), I think that would
be a tragic waste. There is just too much status-quo rigidity out
there. Too many companies sitting pretty with defense contracts that
allow them to spend a million dollars building a "consciousness" system
straight out of the Wompler Research Laboratories (cf John Sladek's "The
Reproductive System").
Richard Loosemore
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agi
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