Bob, et al, On 4/20/08, Bob Mottram <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Until a true AGI is developed I think it will remain necessary to pay > programmers to write programs, at least some of the time. You can't > always rely upon voluntary effort, especially when the problem you > want to solve is fairly obscure.
There is true need, and then there is a quite different perceived need. There are traditional tools, and then there are appropriate tools. There are accepted paradigms, and then there are usable paradigms. There is knowledge, and then there are epiphanies. A not-so-funny thing happened on the way to the 21st century. A growing feeling that programmers were a dime-a-dozen and that gray hair was a disabling condition grew to almost universal acceptance. The net effect of this was to reduce the working careers of programmers to too little to really "get it", and thereby plunged the entire field into a morass of mediocrity. The ~1% of stellar performers who could produce tight designs for hyper-complex systems and quickly code them to work were lost among the 90% unemployed or underemployed, resulting in Corporate America simply abandoning hyper-complex designs as being unacceptably risky. In another couple of decades this phenomenon will make the short journey from misconception to reality as the current stellar performers fade away on boards like this. I know of NO larger corporation who currently fails to fit this pattern. Have you met and talked with any of the current crop of PhDs? The BIG thing that I notice is that they actually BELIEVE the stuff that they are told in college, rather than simply accepting it as one view and continuing the search for better answers as past generations did. Even the chairman of the local major university's CS department fits this pattern, as he schedules colloquiums a year in advance! This combination of corporations and graduates is STABLE - it can never advance beyond the current state of the art in any area that is beyond individual achievement. Hence, Bob is at once both right and wrong: Right, because major projects will doubtless require more than volunteer effort. Wrong, because the supply of adequately good people for hire is very rapidly dwindling. Of course, this constitutes a reductio ad absurdum situation establishing that the underlying assumption, that someone is going to build AGI, is very probably wrong. Have I missed something here? Steve Richfield ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=101455710-f059c4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
