Re: [singularity] Re: Promoting an A.S.P.C,A.G.I.
Matt Mahoney wrote: --- Mike Tintner [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: My point was how do you test the *truth* of items of knowledge. Google tests the *popularity* of items. Not the same thing at all. And it won't work. It does work because the truth is popular. Look at prediction markets. Look at Wikipedia. It is well known that groups make better decisions as a whole than the individuals in those groups (e.g. democracies vs. dictatorships). Combining knowledge from independent sources and testing their reliability is a well known machine learning technique which I use in the PAQ data compression series. I understand the majority can sometimes be wrong, but the truth eventually comes out in a marketplace that rewards truth. Perhaps you have not read my proposal at http://www.mattmahoney.net/agi.html or don't understand it. Some of us have read it, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with Artificial Intelligence. It is a labor-intensive search engine, nothing more. I have no idea why you would call it an AI or an AGI. It is not autonomous, contains no thinking mechanisms, nothing. Even as a alabor intensive search engine there is no guarantee it would work, because the conflict resolution issues are all complexity-governed. I am astonished that you would so blatantly call it something that it is not. Richard Loosemore --- singularity Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/11983/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/11983/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=4007604id_secret=98631122-712fa4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [singularity] Re: Promoting an A.S.P.C,A.G.I.
--- Richard Loosemore [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Matt Mahoney wrote: Perhaps you have not read my proposal at http://www.mattmahoney.net/agi.html or don't understand it. Some of us have read it, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with Artificial Intelligence. It is a labor-intensive search engine, nothing more. I have no idea why you would call it an AI or an AGI. It is not autonomous, contains no thinking mechanisms, nothing. Even as a alabor intensive search engine there is no guarantee it would work, because the conflict resolution issues are all complexity-governed. I am astonished that you would so blatantly call it something that it is not. It is not now. I think it will be in 30 years. If I was to describe the Internet to you in 1978 I think you would scoff too. We were supposed to have flying cars and robotic butlers by now. How could Google make $145 billion by building an index of something that didn't even exist? Just what do you want out of AGI? Something that thinks like a person or something that does what you ask it to? -- Matt Mahoney, [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- singularity Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/11983/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/11983/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=4007604id_secret=98631122-712fa4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [singularity] Re: Promoting an A.S.P.C,A.G.I.
On Apr 9, 2008, at 12:33 PM, Derek Zahn wrote: Matt Mahoney writes: Just what do you want out of AGI? Something that thinks like a person or something that does what you ask it to? The or is interesting. If it really thinks like a person and at at least human level then I doubt very much it will do what you ask any more often than people do. What I want out of AGI is something that thinks a lot better, deeper, faster and richer than human beings do. I would refer it to be a colleague but I doubt it would find me very interesting for long. I think this is an excellent question, one I do not have a clear answer to myself, even for my own use. Imagine we have an AGI. What exactly does it do? What *should* it do? It does whatever we tell it is not good enough. What would we tell it to do? Beware the wish granting genie conundrum. And no wigged-out scifi allowed; you can't say invent molecular nanotechnology and build me a Dyson sphere -- first, because such a vision is completely unhelpful in guiding how to get there, and second because there's no reason to think a currently-envisionable AGI would be millions of times smarter than all of humanity put together. It doesn't need to be. If it could simply pull together all relevant research more efficiently and have greater capacity to consider more facets at once then it could suggest new directions and form new integrations that humans would not see and thus be more likely to arrive at solutions than all current researchers. --- singularity Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/11983/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/11983/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=4007604id_secret=98631122-712fa4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [singularity] Re: Promoting an A.S.P.C,A.G.I.
Matt Mahoney wrote: --- Richard Loosemore [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Matt Mahoney wrote: Perhaps you have not read my proposal at http://www.mattmahoney.net/agi.html or don't understand it. Some of us have read it, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with Artificial Intelligence. It is a labor-intensive search engine, nothing more. I have no idea why you would call it an AI or an AGI. It is not autonomous, contains no thinking mechanisms, nothing. Even as a alabor intensive search engine there is no guarantee it would work, because the conflict resolution issues are all complexity-governed. I am astonished that you would so blatantly call it something that it is not. It is not now. I think it will be in 30 years. If I was to describe the Internet to you in 1978 I think you would scoff too. We were supposed to have flying cars and robotic butlers by now. How could Google make $145 billion by building an index of something that didn't even exist? Just what do you want out of AGI? Something that thinks like a person or something that does what you ask it to? Either will do: your suggestion achieves neither. If I ask your non-AGI the following question: How can I build an AGI that can think at a speed that is 1000 times faster than the speed of human thought? it will say: Hi, my name is Ben and I just picked up your question. I would love to give you the answer but you have to send $20 million and give me a few years. That is not the answer I would expect of an AGI. A real AGI would do original research to solve the problem, and solve it *itself*. Isn't this, like, just too obvious for words? ;-) Richard Loosemore --- singularity Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/11983/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/11983/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=4007604id_secret=98631122-712fa4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
RE: [singularity] Re: Promoting an A.S.P.C,A.G.I.
I asked: Imagine we have an AGI. What exactly does it do? What *should* it do? Note that I think I roughly understand Matt's vision for this: roughly, it is google, and it will gradually get better at answering questions and taking commands as more capable systems are linked in to the network. When and whether it passes the AGI threshold is rather an arbitrary and unimportant issue, it just gets more capable of answering questions and taking orders. I find that a very interesting and clear vision. I'm wondering if there are others. --- singularity Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/11983/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/11983/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=4007604id_secret=98631122-712fa4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
RE: [singularity] Re: Promoting an A.S.P.C,A.G.I.
Richard Loosemore: I am not sure I understand. There is every reason to think that a currently-envisionable AGI would be millions of times smarter than all of humanity put together. Simply build a human-level AGI, then get it to bootstrap to a level of, say, a thousand times human speed (easy enough: we are not asking for better thinking processes, just faster implementation), then ask it to compact itself enough that we can afford to build and run a few billion of these systems in parallel This viewpoint assumes that human intelligence is essentially trivial; I see no evidence for this and tend to assume that a properly-programmed gameboy is not going to pass the turing test. I realize that people on this list tend to be more optimistic on this subject so I do accept your answer as one viewpoint. It is surely a minority view, though, and my question only makes sense if you assume significant limitations in the capability of near-term hardware. --- singularity Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/11983/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/11983/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=4007604id_secret=98631122-712fa4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [singularity] Re: Promoting an A.S.P.C,A.G.I.
Derek Zahn wrote: I asked: Imagine we have an AGI. What exactly does it do? What *should* it do? Note that I think I roughly understand Matt's vision for this: roughly, it is google, and it will gradually get better at answering questions and taking commands as more capable systems are linked in to the network. When and whether it passes the AGI threshold is rather an arbitrary and unimportant issue, it just gets more capable of answering questions and taking orders. I find that a very interesting and clear vision. I'm wondering if there are others. Surely not! This line of argument looks like a new version of the same story that occurred in the very early days of science fiction. People looked at the newly-forming telephone system and they thought that maybe if it just got big enough it might become .. intelligent. Their reasoning was ... well, there wasn't any reasoning behind the idea. It was just a mystical maybe lots of this will somehow add up to more than the sum of the parts, without any justification for why the whole should be more than the sum of the parts. In exactly the same way, there is absolutely no reason to believe that Google will somehow reach a threshold and (magically) become intelligent. Why would that happen? If they deliberately set out to build an AGI somewhere, and then hook that up to google, that is a different matter entirely. But that is not what is being suggested here. Richard Loosemore. --- singularity Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/11983/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/11983/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=4007604id_secret=98631122-712fa4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [singularity] Re: Promoting an A.S.P.C,A.G.I.
Derek Zahn wrote: Richard Loosemore: I am not sure I understand. There is every reason to think that a currently-envisionable AGI would be millions of times smarter than all of humanity put together. Simply build a human-level AGI, then get it to bootstrap to a level of, say, a thousand times human speed (easy enough: we are not asking for better thinking processes, just faster implementation), then ask it to compact itself enough that we can afford to build and run a few billion of these systems in parallel This viewpoint assumes that human intelligence is essentially trivial; I see no evidence for this and tend to assume that a properly-programmed gameboy is not going to pass the turing test. I realize that people on this list tend to be more optimistic on this subject so I do accept your answer as one viewpoint. It is surely a minority view, though, and my question only makes sense if you assume significant limitations in the capability of near-term hardware. But if you want to make a meaningful statement about limitations, would it not be prudent to start from a clear understanding of how the size of the task can be measured, and how those measurements relate to the available resources? If there is no information at all, we could not make a statement either way. Without knowing how to bake a cake, or what the contents of your pantry are, I don't think you can state that We simply do not have what it takes to bake a cake in the near future. I am only saying that I see no particular limitations, given the things that I know about how to buld an AGI. That is the best I can do. Richard Loosemore --- singularity Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/11983/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/11983/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=4007604id_secret=98631122-712fa4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
RE: [singularity] Re: Promoting an A.S.P.C,A.G.I.
Samantha Atkins writes: Beware the wish granting genie conundrum. Yeah, you put it better than I did; I'm not asking what wishes we'd ask a genie to grant, I'm wondering specifically what we want from the machines that Ben and Richard and Matt and so on are thinking about and building. Simple things like robot, clean my house are valuable because they focus clearly on what capabilities 'robot' probably has to have to achieve it. Similarly, pass the turing test is valuable; we can wonder specifically about what the machine would have to do to achieve that goal. Do Science is a bit vague for me though. --- singularity Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/11983/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/11983/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=4007604id_secret=98631122-712fa4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
RE: [singularity] Re: Promoting an A.S.P.C,A.G.I.
Richard Loosemore: I am only saying that I see no particular limitations, given the things that I know about how to buld an AGI. That is the best I can do. Sorry to flood everybody's mailbox today; I will make this my last message. I'm not looking to impose a viewpoint on anybody; you have communicated yours and from your perspective a question what should an AGI do (or what is AGI for?) is not particularly meaningful -- I gather that from your perspective once your many-year multibillion dollar research program is finished the result will be almost magically powerful so speaking of its uses or capabilities in terms that could help us figure out what we are building is not useful. Others have different viewpoints, either published (Kurzweil, Moravec, etc, and even some pessimists perhaps :) ) or privately held about the cognitive capabilities of near-term computing power that lead to different conclusions. You argue forcefully for your position, but it isn't the only one. --- singularity Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/11983/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/11983/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=4007604id_secret=98631122-712fa4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [singularity] Re: Promoting an A.S.P.C,A.G.I.
--- Richard Loosemore [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Matt Mahoney wrote: Just what do you want out of AGI? Something that thinks like a person or something that does what you ask it to? Either will do: your suggestion achieves neither. If I ask your non-AGI the following question: How can I build an AGI that can think at a speed that is 1000 times faster than the speed of human thought? it will say: Hi, my name is Ben and I just picked up your question. I would love to give you the answer but you have to send $20 million and give me a few years. That is not the answer I would expect of an AGI. A real AGI would do original research to solve the problem, and solve it *itself*. Isn't this, like, just too obvious for words? ;-) Your question is not well formed. Computers can already think 1000 times faster than humans for things like arithmetic. Does your AGI also need to know how to feed your dog? Or should it guess and build it anyway? I would think such a system would be dangerous. I expect a competitive message passing network to improve over time. Early versions will work like an interactive search engine. You may get web pages or an answer from another human in real time, and you may later receive responses to your persistent query. If your question can be matched to an expert in some domain that happens to be on the net, then it gets routed there. Google already does this. For example, if you type an address, it gives you a map and offers driving directions. If you ask it how many teaspoons in a cubic parsec? it will compute the answer (try it). It won't answer every question, but with 1000 times more computing power than Google, I expect there will be many more domain experts. I expect as hardware gets more powerful, peers will get better at things like recognizing people in images, writing programs, and doing original research. I don't claim that I can solve these problems. I do claim that there is an incentive to provide these services and that the problems are not intractable given powerful hardware, and therefore the services will be provided. There are two things to make the problem easier. First, peers will have access to a vast knowledge source that does not exist today. Second, peers can specialize in a narrow domain, e.g. only recognize one particular person in images, or write software or do research in some obscure, specialized field. Is this labor intensive? Yes. A $1 quadrillion system won't just build itself. People will build it because they will get back more value than they put in. -- Matt Mahoney, [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- singularity Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/11983/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/11983/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=4007604id_secret=98631122-712fa4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
