On 08 Oct 2012, at 23:39, Russell Standish wrote:
On Mon, Oct 08, 2012 at 01:13:35PM -0400, Richard Ruquist wrote:
The real reasons we don’t have AGI yet
A response to David Deutsch’s recent article on AGI
October 8, 2012 by Ben Goertzel
Thanks for posting this, Richard. I was thinking of writing my own
detailed response to David Deutsch's op ed, but Ben Goertzel has done
such a good job, I now don't have to!
My response, similar to Ben's is that David does not convincingly
explain why Popperian epistemology is the "secret sauce". In fact, it
is not even at all obvious how to practically apply Popperian
epistemology to the task at hand. Until some more detailed practical
proposal is put forward, the best I can say is, meh, I'll believe it
when it happens.
Strictly speaking, John Case has refuted Popperian epistemology(*), in
the sense that he showed that some Non Popperian machine can recognize
larger classes and more classes of phenomena than Popperian machine.
Believing in some non refutable theories can give an advantage with
respect of some classes of phenomena.
The problem that exercises me (when I get a chance to exercise it) is
that of creativity. David Deutsch correctly identifies that this is
one of
the main impediments to AGI. Yet biological evolution is a creative
process, one for which epistemology apparently has no role at all.
Not sure it is more creative than the UMs, the UD, the Mandelbrot set,
or arithmetic.
Continuous, open-ended creativity in evolution is considered the main
problem in Artificial Life (and perhaps other fields). Solving it may
be the work of a single moment of inspiration (I wish), but more
likely it will involve incremental advances in topics such as
information, complexity, emergence and other such partly philosophical
topics before we even understand what it means for something to be
open-ended creative.
I agree. That's probably why people take time to understand that UMs
and arithmetic are already creative.
Popperian epistemology, to the extent it has a
role, will come much further down the track.
Yes. With is good uses, and its misuses. Popper just made precise what
science is, except for its criteria of interesting and good theory. In
fact Popper theory was a real interesting theory, in the sense of
Popper, as it was refutable. But then people should not be so much
astonished that it has been refuted (of course in a theoretical
context(*)). I can accept that Popper analysis has a wide spectrum
where it works well, but in the foundations, it cannot be used a dogma.
Bruno
(*) CASE J. & NGO-MANGUELLE S., 1979, Refinements of inductive
inference by Popperian
machines. Tech. Rep., Dept. of Computer Science, State Univ. of New-
York, Buffalo.
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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