Derek Zahn wrote:
Richard Loosemore:
> So, for example, if I were organizing a conference on AGI I would want
> people to address such questions as:
I find your list of questions to be quite fascinating, and I'd love to
participate in an active list or conference devoted to these
"Foundations of Cognitive Computing" type of issues.
However, it doesn't particularly bother me that people are building
systems without explicit answers to these things, because I find the
systems themselves, and the ideas about AI that they embody, to be very
cool on their own terms. I am not competing with any of them for money
or fame, I am hopeful that lessons will be learned no matter how right
or wrong their approaches end up, I think we're decades away from AGI
systems that are intelligent enough to have a real impact on our society
(a more useful phrase that than "human level" IMO) so I'm not mad that
wasted effort is delaying a cure for hunger and disease. People do not
accept critiques that cast their entire professional output as worthless
and their most basic premises as fatally flawed... if a point can be
made in an understandable way from the assumed world view of somebody
else, I do think it's worth making, but it's somewhat rare to be able to
do so on material with which I have only a casual familiarity.
The deep questions that interest you (and me and, to an extent i
believe, everybody on this list) are troublesome because they are so
hard to talk about. Consider your complex systems argument. There
appears to be some basic point-of-view differences that make
communication on these topics difficult. It's not all pigheadedness or
ill will, I don't think.
Or (picking one of your questions at random):
> - What assumptions do we have to buy into if we go with bayesian nets
> as a choice of reasoning/representation formalism? And how would we go
> about finding out if those assumptions are valid enough to make it safe
> to use bayes nets?
I'm not sure how to even begin a conversation about such a question.
First we have to decide what a reasoning/representation formalism has to
do, and I'm afraid everybody has a different set of premises on points
like that.
Those debates would be highly worthwhile, but I doubt many people will
bother with them.
I do not have a lot of time to respond (you raise many interesting
issues yourself), so I will have to confine myself to just one remark.
About "People do not accept critiques that cast their entire
professional output as worthless and their most basic premises as
fatally flawed" ..... I understand this perfectly, but what would you do
if there really was an issue that everyone was avoiding because it made
them feel uncomfortable in this way? Someone has to say it. Is there a
kind and gentle way to say it? I think I do say it in a kind and gentle
way most of the time (I just patiently explain it).
If you read Mitchell Waldrop's book called 'Complexity' you will see
something quite fascinating, I believe. Everything I am going through
now was *already* suffered by early complex systems people back in the
late 80s and 90s. In that book you can read about situations that look
like a carbon copy of some of the things that have happened here, and on
the SL4 list. You can even see an episode, IIRC, that closely mirrors
the kind of name-calling that Ben engaged in last night.
People did not just disagree about the value of complex systems ideas,
they became utterly incensed by them, and some people thought it
perfectly acceptible to launch the most vicious personal attacks against
anyone promoting those ideas.
You know, I presume, about the extent of the personal attacks that I
have had to suffer already? I would hardly believe it if it had
happened to someone else.
Richard Loosemore
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agi
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