Harry Chesley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > One of the classic current AI issues is grounding, the argument being that a > dictionary cannot be complete because it is only self-referential, and *has* > to be grounded at some point to be truly meaningful. This argument is used > to claim that abstract AI can never succeed, and that there must be a > physical component of the AI that connects it to reality. > > I have never bought this line of reasoning. It seems to me that meaning is a > layered thing, and that you can do perfectly good reasoning at one (or two > or three) levels in the layering, without having to go "all the way down."
I mostly agree and I have a number of reasons why. First of all, an AI program can only learn through its input-output data environment, this idea of grounding, as if it would somehow make it all more real (to a computer program) is philosophically beyond the limits of reason. Let me emphasize that I believe that if an AI program was actually capable of high level reasoning, then there is no doubt that grounding would have a dramatic effect on its level of insight. My pov though is that at the current level of AI research an exaggerated emphasis on grounding really won't produce the higher level reasoning that we are thinking about in AGI. Of course if all the reasoning of an AI program was based on a minimal amount of data to work with then we cannot really expect much out of it. But with language we can provide a working AI program with as many details as it could handle if it were only capable of higher level reasoning to begin with. I do think circularity and (what I call) networkity are serious problems. However, they are not caused by the choice of a rich natrual language domain, they are caused by inadequate reasoning and an inadequate IO data environment. First we have to figure out a way to get our computers to do some higher level reasoning in an interactive data environment that has the right stuff, and then they will undoubtably show dramatic improvements when they are provided with a greater range of IO interactions that would provide them with more grounding. But first we have to figure it out, because there is not a robot in the world that will be able to figure it out before we do. Jim Bromer ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=108809214-a0d121 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
