Richard wrote: > Then, when we came back from the break, Ben Goertzel announced that the > roundtable on symbol grounding was cancelled, to make room for some other > discussion on a topic like "the future of AGI", or some such. I was > outraged by this. The subsequent discussion was a pathetic waste of time, > during which we just listened to a bunch of people making vacuous > speculations and jokes about artificial intelligence. > > In the end, I decided that the reason this happened was that when the > workshop was being planned, the title was chosen in ignorance. That, in > fact, Ben never even intended to talk about the real issue of grounding > symbols, but just needed a plausible-sounding theme-buzzword, and so he just > intended the workshop to be about a meaningless concept like connecting AGI > systems to the real world.
No, that is not the case. What happened, as I recall, was that the conference schedule was running late, and one of the speakers from the session on symbol grounding had cancelled anyway, so it seemed apropos to skip from that session to the next one -- since **something** had to be cancelled to make the schedule fit.... That conference was a small workshop and was pretty loosely organized, I decided to let the discussion and content flow according to the general interests of the participants. As it happened the participants as a whole were not gripped by the symbol grounding theme and gravitated to other topics, which was OK with me. Unfortunately to Richard this seemed to have been his main interest. Feedback on AGI-06 overall was overwhelmingly positive; in fact Richard's is the only significantly negative report I've seen. AGI-08 was more formally structured, as will be AGI-09; but these are larger conferences, which require more structure to run at all smoothly. -- Ben G ------------------------------------------- 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
