On Thu, Jan 6, 2022 at 12:27 PM Ivan V. <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Perhaps I could convince you to look at the URE, and figure out how to > layer your idea of a "rule" on top of it? > > Well, it has begun to be more of a personal matter between me and God. > I've been working and experimenting on this cause for more than twenty > years now, and although I reinvented the hot water with most of my work, I > feel I'll just explode if I don't do it my own way now. Now I'm aware of > URE and Prolog, those are good tools, and it would be faster for me to use > them, but I also have this little bit different perspective of mine to try > to justify my efforts. I simply can't come out of all this trouble with my > empty hands. I hope you'll understand it. > Well, you have to do what you have to do. Smart people who don't get to do what they want to do end up unhappy in life. I've seen it happen far too often, and this is why success should always be celebrated: it is rare, it is uncommon, and so when it happens, it should be trumpeted. This conversation is in the context of AGI research. In doing this, what does it mean to come away empty-handed? Well, in AGI, everyone does. Whatever you build, it won't work. At best, you have an incremental achievement: maybe you've learned something you haven't known before. Maybe you've learned something no one has known before, and successfully communicated it to others. How about software in general? A long long time ago, I worked on a software system developed by NASA (wow! you might say) It was a combo bug-tracker and project-management-tracker. It was really pretty good, actually. But no one used it, it never became popular, it died in total obscurity, and is forgotten. My work on it (I think I spent months on it) you could say, I left "empty-handed". But then I did learn something, and part of what I learned has influenced the design of the atomspace. It was educational. But even this is rare. Approx 99% of all software ever written dies a lonesome death. The 1% that survives is very lucky. But we who work in software, we are lucky, because we can sometimes build something enduring. Compare this to stage actors in a theatre play: once the show is over, that's it. It lives on only in memory, and in stage-bills. That's it. Compare this to insurance agents, who push around paper all their lives: what do they have to show for their work? Maybe a house that once burned down, now can be rebuilt? Or a nurse, a doctor: they save someone, who can then live a few more years before they die? Life is transient. We all leave, empty-handed, as it were. Some few people, more and more these days, have the luxury of deciding what to do to be effective. Funny, but that decision turns out to be a hard problem. I think things work out better when we work together, but ... so it goes. --linas -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "opencog" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/opencog/CAHrUA3586y0S4nBqs0y2HgU2fgYdynZguEJUU_Xo0FZxJpTF-w%40mail.gmail.com.
