Ed Porter wrote:
I don’t think this AGI list should be so quick to dismiss a $4.9 million
dollar grant to create an AGI. It will not necessarily be “vaporware.”
I think we should view it as a good sign.
Even if it is for a project that runs the risk, like many DARPA projects
(like most scientific funding in general) of not necessarily placing its
money where it might do the most good --- it is likely to at least
produce some interesting results --- and it just might make some very
important advances in our field.
The article from http://www.physorg.com/news148754667.html said:
“…a $4.9 million grant…for the first phase of DARPA's Systems of
Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE) project.
Tononi and scientists from Columbia University and IBM will work on the
"software" for the thinking computer, while nanotechnology and
supercomputing experts from Cornell, Stanford and the University of
California-Merced will create the "hardware." Dharmendra Modha of IBM is
the principal investigator.
The idea is to create a computer capable of sorting through multiple
streams of changing data, to look for patterns and make logical decisions.
There's another requirement: The finished cognitive computer should be
as small as a the brain of a small mammal and use as little power as a
100-watt light bulb. It's a major challenge. But it's what our brains do
every day.
I have just spent several hours reading a Tononi paper, “An information
integration theory of consciousness” and skimmed several parts of his
book "A Universe of Consciousness" he wrote with Edleman, whom Ben has
referred to often in his writings. (I have attached my mark up of the
article, which if you read just the yellow highlighted text, or (for
more detail) the red, you can get a quick understanding of. You can
also view it in MSWord outline mode if you like.)
This paper largely agrees with my notion, stated multiple times on this
list, that consciousness is an incredibly complex computation that
interacts with itself in a very rich manner that makes it aware of itself.
For the record, this looks like the paper that I listened to Tononi talk
about a couple of years ago -- the one I mentioned in my last message.
It is, for want of a better word, nonsense. And since people take me to
task for being so dismissive, let me add that it is the central thesis
of the paper that is "nonsense": if you ask yourself very carefully
what it is he is claiming, you can easily come up with counterexammples
that make a mockery of his conclusion.
Richard Loosemore
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agi
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