Ben: in taking the "virtual world" approach to AGI, we're very much **hoping** that a subset of "human everyday physical reality" is good enough. ..
Ben, Which subset(s)? The idea that you can virtually recreate any part or processes of reality seems horribly flawed - and unexamined. Take the development of intelligence. You seem (from recent exchanges) to accept that there is very roughly some natural order to the development of intelligence. So for example, you can't learn about planets & universes, if you haven't first learned about simple objects like stones and balls - nor about politics, governments and international relations if you haven't first learned about language, speech/conversation, emotions, other minds & much more. Now we - science - have some ideas about this natural order - about how we have to develop from understanding simple to complex things. But overall our picture is pathetic and hugely gapped. For science to produce an extensive picture of development here would - at a guess - take at least hundreds of thousands, if not millions of scientists, and many thousands (or millions) of discoveries, and many changes of competing paradigms. What are the chances then of an individual like you, or team of individuals, being able to design a coherent, practical order of intellectual development for an artificial, virtual agent straight off in a few years ? The same applies to any part of reality. We - science - may have a detailed picture of how some pieces of objects, like stones and water, work. But again our overall ability to model how all those particles, atoms and molecules interrelate in any given object, and how the object as a whole behaves, is still very limited. We still have all kinds of gaps in our picture of water. Scientific models are always far from the real thing. Again, to come anywhere near completing those models will take new armies of scientists. What are the chances then of a few individuals being able to correctly model the behaviour of any objects in the real world on a flat screen? IOW the "short cut" you hope for is probably the longest way round you could possibly choose. Robotics - forgetting altogether about formally modelling the world - and just interacting with it directly, is actually shorter by far. So I doubt whether you have ever seriously examined how you would recreate a *particular* "subset of reality".in any detail - as simple even, say, as a ball - as opposed to the general idea. Have you? [Nb We're talking here about composite models of objects - so it's easy enough to create a reasonable picture of a ball bouncing on a hard surface, but what happens when your agent sits on it, or rubs it on his shirt, or bounces it on water, or sand, or throws it at another ball in mid-air, or (as we've partly discussed) plays with it like an infant ?] ------------------------------------------- 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=123753653-47f84b Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
