[agi] Open AGI?
Hi all, I'm curious about the general sentiments that people have about the appropriate level of openness for an AGI project. My mind certainly isn't made up on the issue and I can see reasons for going either way. If a single individual or small group of people made a sudden break through in AGI design this would place a huge amount of power in their hands. I could easily see this situation being dangerous. On the other hand I'm not sure that I'd want too many people knowing how to do it either! Already the world seems to have a few too many people who have the detailed knowledge required to build a working nuclear weapon for example. What are your thoughts? Surely this has been debated many times before I suppose? Cheers Shane --- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [agi] Open AGI?
Shane, I fully agree with what you said. My own plan for NARS is to publish the logic it used in detail (including the grammar of its formal language, the semantics, the inference rules with their truth-value functions), but, at the current time, not to reveal the technical details of the implementation (including the memory structure and control strategy), though the basic ideas behind them are already published. Pei - Original Message - From: Shane Legg [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, March 05, 2004 4:42 AM Subject: [agi] Open AGI? Hi all, I'm curious about the general sentiments that people have about the appropriate level of openness for an AGI project. My mind certainly isn't made up on the issue and I can see reasons for going either way. If a single individual or small group of people made a sudden break through in AGI design this would place a huge amount of power in their hands. I could easily see this situation being dangerous. On the other hand I'm not sure that I'd want too many people knowing how to do it either! Already the world seems to have a few too many people who have the detailed knowledge required to build a working nuclear weapon for example. What are your thoughts? Surely this has been debated many times before I suppose? Cheers Shane --- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED] --- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: [agi] Open AGI?
Shane, I have also considered using massively distributed processing a la [EMAIL PROTECTED] for Novamente; but in a Novamente context, this issue is not closely tied to open-ness. This is because we could use massively distributed processing for aspects of Novamente cognition, without releasing the vast bulk of the Novamente source. Our architecture would involve a central Novamente cluster, doing types of cognitive processing that are better done centralized (mostly probabilistic inference), and then a massively distributed periphery doing things that are better done massively distributed (mostly evolutionary learning). -- Ben G -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Shane Sent: Friday, March 05, 2004 9:04 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [agi] Open AGI? Hi Ben, I'm not really interested in open source in the software sense in particular, but rather openness in general. Of course if you open source the code then the project is very open in general too! I see that you run sort of an intermediate approach here, as does Pei. Peter takes a more closed approach with A2I2, which probably reflects his background in business rather than academia. Others like James Rogers take a very closed approach; in fact I don't think I have ever seen a document describing what he is working on? If there are more closed projects out there well we probably wouldn't even hear about them in that case ;-) I understand your desire to limit the number of people working on your code out of purely practical reasons also. However with the emphasis on genetic algorithms in vetta I have another reason to open up the project --- I might actually need the participation of many people donating their CPU time in order to obtain sufficient computer power. I figure that if the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has managed to get 2 million years of CPU time then perhaps a few people out there would also be interested in donating CPU time for a Search for Artificial General Intelligence. Unfortunately SAGI is a really bad sounding name! So vetta it remains. With millions of years of computer time simulating billions of generations on a very large population of learning networks perhaps some interesting evolution could start to take place. However by taking this road the project would be very open as I'd be literally distributing the design of the system as it evolved to a large number of computers all around the world on a regular basis. I'm not sure that this much openness would be a good thing... this is why I got thinking about this question. Cheers Shane ___ Yahoo! Messenger - Communicate instantly...Ping your friends today! Download Messenger Now http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com/download/index.html --- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED] --- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [agi] Open AGI?
I understand that you are not specifically talking about open source, but as the auther of several open source visualization systems (including Vis5D, which was probably the first open source visualization system) I want to point out that there is a real opportunity for someone who starts an open source AGI project. When you provide a good open source system, all kinds of smart people you never heard of send you valuable new functions to add to your software, as well as subjecting your system to much more exhaustive testing than you could (and often sending you bug fixes). Unless you are rich, you can't hire the kind of talent that volunteers to help. I don't know of any current open source AGI project, so there may be the opportunity for someone to create the first. Or is there already one that I'm not aware of? Of course, you have to create a good system (and one that encourages others to dig in and add pieces) in order to create a strong community of programmers around it. You could be the Linus Torvalds of AGI. If I were working on an AGI systems (I'm not, since I'm about to turn 56, about to retire, and currently enjoying a breather from coding my butt off for the past 35 years) I'd definitely see creating the first open source AGI system as a big opportunity. Cheers, Bill -- Bill Hibbard, SSEC, 1225 W. Dayton St., Madison, WI 53706 [EMAIL PROTECTED] 608-263-4427 fax: 608-263-6738 http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/~billh/vis.html --- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [agi] Open AGI?
Bill, I'd definitely see creating the first open source AGI system as a big opportunity. Do you see any overwhelming risks in making AGI technology available to everyone including malcontents and criminals? Would the rest of society be able to handle these risks if they also had access to AGI computation power?? Cheers, Philip --- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [agi] Open AGI?
Shane, In your first posting on the open AGI subject you mentioned that you were concerned about the risk on the one hand of: * inordinate power being concentrated in the hands of the controllers of the first advanced AGI * power to do serious harm being made widely available if AGI technology is available to all. My guess is that if there is very restricted access to a *very* powerful technology - especially one that could be used to make lots of money or be used to make a person or an organisation or nation very powerful in other ways that these sorts of forces will beat a path to the source of that power and they will make sure they have it (by whatever means works). All it will take I suspect is a serious demonstration of the 'proof of concept' and this process will be set decisively in motion. Making the whole technology available to everyone would be one way to avoid the concentration of power, but it would put the technology in the hands of every loner malcontent and criminal across the globe. So on the face of it that doesn't seem to be such a good way to go. But perhaps if everyone had access to advanced AGI computational power in the way that most of us have access to desktop computers now - would that give the rest of society the computational power to keep the loner malcontents and crime syndicates in check?? Maybe the way to go is to make sure that AGI computational power is rapidly disseminated to a *medium-sized* initial circle of users - corporations, governments and civil society groups - so that none of the legitimate forces in society get a power advantage over the others and so the legitimate forces in society are widely empowered and can keep on top of the effects of the inadvertent (but inevitable) diffusion of AGI power to malcontents and criminals. If super advanced AGI power emerges under the control of one or a few powerful governments then I think power mongers will simply work to make sure they can control the government and hence the AGI power (as they have worked to control the military industrial complexes of the most powerful nations). If AGI power emerges as a purely commercial proposition then I think civil society will be priced out of the market and the power balance in society will be seriously disturbed in the direction of further concentration of power favouring either corporations and or governments. Cheers, Philip --- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: [agi] Open AGI?
Shane wrote: I see that you run sort of an intermediate approach here, as does Pei. Peter takes a more closed approach with A2I2, which probably reflects his background in business rather than academia. Others like James Rogers take a very closed approach; in fact I don't think I have ever seen a document describing what he is working on? If there are more closed projects out there well we probably wouldn't even hear about them in that case ;-) A big part of it, for me at least, is that I would rather be working on implementation details than writing up documents in the excruciating detail required to really make a bulletproof presentation. I have limited time, and writing about things for public consumption (rather than doing things) does not help me actually accomplish anything -- I don't need PR. Much better to have a killer demo, as Eugen would say. So I bite my tongue and make sure everything is polished, the systems are experienced, and any demo will be indisputably killer. That said, I've kind of promised to several people that I would publish a document tree by the end of the first half of this year that starts to cover the technologies in detail, as well as some papers on some interesting tangential theory stuff that has little to do with AGI. Not enough to duplicate the implementation, but enough to make the underlying theory relatively transparent. Probably right after we're officially moved to Palo Alto. Links will be posted when it actually goes up; the majority of it hasn't been written yet. j. andrew rogers --- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: [agi] Open AGI?
Hi Bill Being in your position (namely age wise), I would agree open source is the way to go particularly if someone could put together some lucid requirements, objectives and some substantial key seed ideas and/or models to get the ball rolling. Gus -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Bill Hibbard Sent: Friday, March 05, 2004 10:26 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [agi] Open AGI? I understand that you are not specifically talking about open source, but as the auther of several open source visualization systems (including Vis5D, which was probably the first open source visualization system) I want to point out that there is a real opportunity for someone who starts an open source AGI project. When you provide a good open source system, all kinds of smart people you never heard of send you valuable new functions to add to your software, as well as subjecting your system to much more exhaustive testing than you could (and often sending you bug fixes). Unless you are rich, you can't hire the kind of talent that volunteers to help. I don't know of any current open source AGI project, so there may be the opportunity for someone to create the first. Or is there already one that I'm not aware of? Of course, you have to create a good system (and one that encourages others to dig in and add pieces) in order to create a strong community of programmers around it. You could be the Linus Torvalds of AGI. If I were working on an AGI systems (I'm not, since I'm about to turn 56, about to retire, and currently enjoying a breather from coding my butt off for the past 35 years) I'd definitely see creating the first open source AGI system as a big opportunity. Cheers, Bill -- Bill Hibbard, SSEC, 1225 W. Dayton St., Madison, WI 53706 [EMAIL PROTECTED] 608-263-4427 fax: 608-263-6738 http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/~billh/vis.html --- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED] --- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[agi] Novamente project seeking volunteers
Hi all, The Novamente project is seeking volunteers again ;-) The last time I actively sought volunteers, in 2002, what happened was that out of about 15 people who expressed interest, four people ended up making contributions, and one ended up making highly significant contributions and eventually joining the team full-time. I rate that a success, because finding any one person with the combination of ability and motivation to make a big contribution to Novamente is very hard. This time, I want to take a slightly different approach to bringing new minds into the project, which is described in some brief informal documents Ive just uploaded to www.novamente.net (some of this stuff will be moved to the agiri.org site eventually; an overhaul of that rather out-of-date site is currently in the works). -- Ben G To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
