Steve:No one here is really planning to do wonderful things that people can't 
reasonably do,

Why don't you specify examples of the problems you see as appropriate for 
exploration?

Your statement *sounds* a little confused - it may not be. The big challenge 
for an AGI is to solve the problems that people *can* solve reasonably all the 
time - although often with mixed results -  but that narrow AI's can't.

Those are the problematic, wicked, ill-structured problems where the solver, by 
definition, doesn't know what to do. From learning to walk, talk, have 
conversations about food, the weather or football, play with your toys, get 
your mommy to change her mind, write a story on what you did yesterday, plan 
your morning or a visit to the shops, write an essay, or a post to your AGI 
group,  or play football, or hide-and-seek, or even decide whether to take a 
left or a right round the person blocking your way etc etc.

These are the problems where you have to work out what to do as you go along, 
involving various forms of ad hoc thought, investigation, research, and 
experiment. You only have a rough idea of where you want to get to, and you 
have to go out and *find* a way to get there, *without* a predefined set of 
instructions for looking.

You're not likely to find anyone in the whole of AGI present and past to 
discuss these sort of problems with you, let alone any still more complicated 
problems, like invention (of say a cheaper gasoline alternative).

Logic problems, maths problems, programming problems, turing machine problems, 
where you do know what to do, yes. But not problems where you don't 

The insurmountable difficulty that everyone has is that condition of "problems 
where you don't know what to do.* Everyone AFAIK accepts this definition/goal, 
and then proceeds to cheat on it completely. They say "sure I'll deal with that 
problem, but I'll just get someone to tell my AGI what to do first." And they 
do all this without blushing, or sense of irony. They don't even know they're 
cheating.

It's not just this group, it's everyone AFAIK without exception.

You see, if "you don't know what to do," then you don't have a definitive 
method, or set of rules for solving the problem, (and that includes rules for 
how to investigate or research the problem). You certainly have *some* methods 
and rules, but not - and never - a complete set of rules. It shouldn't be that 
hard to accept what I've just said - it's all common sense. Anyone disagree 
with me? Anyone think AGI involves solving problems where you *do* know exactly 
what to do?.

But here's why people have such difficulties and are so congenitally incapable 
of facing the problem of AGI directly. Let me redefine what I've just said - 
i.e. "AGI involves solving problems where you don't know what to do". Any 
proper redefinition must involve: "AGI involves solving problems WITHOUT an 
algorithm."

That's the part people find so tough. But there's no way around it. It's 
obvious - if you have an algorithm, you "know what to do," you're cheating.

But no one in AGI knows how to design or instruct a machine to work without 
algorithms - or, to be more precise, *complete* algorithms. It's unthinkable - 
it seems like asking someone not to breathe...  until, like every problem,. you 
start thinking about it.



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agi
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