[agi] The Singularity
Alright, I have to say this. I don't believe that the singularity is near, or that it will even occur. I am working very hard at developing real artificial general intelligence, but from what I know, it will not come quickly. It will be slow and incremental. The idea that very soon we can create a system that can understand its own code and start programming itself is ludicrous. Any arguments? - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
Re: [agi] The Singularity
On 12/5/06, John Scanlon [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Alright, I have to say this. I don't believe that the singularity is near, or that it will even occur. I am working very hard at developing real artificial general intelligence, but from what I know, it will not come quickly. It will be slow and incremental. The idea that very soon we can create a system that can understand its own code and start programming itself is ludicrous. Any arguments? This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303 Have you read Ray Kurzweil? He doesn't just make things up. There are plenty of reasons to believe in the Singularity. Other than disaster theories there really is no negative evidence I've ever come across. real artificial intelligence .u'i(amusement) A little bit of an oxymoron there. It also seems to imply there is fake artificial intelligence.u'e(wonder). Of course if you could define fake artificial intelligence then you define what real artificial intelligence is. Once you define what real artificial intelligence means, or at least what symptoms you would be willing to satisfy for (Turing test). If it's the Turing test you're after as am I, then language is the key(I like stating the obvious please humour me). Once we established the goal -- a discussion between yourself and the computer in the language of choice. We look at the options that we have available: natural languages; artificial languages. Natural languages tend to be pretty ambiguous hard to parse, hard to code for -- you can do it if you are a masochist I don't mind .ui(happiness). Many/Most artificial languages suffer from similar if not the same kind of ambiguity, though because they are created they by definition can only have as many exceptions as were designed in. There is a promising subset of artificial languages: logical languages. Logical languages adhere to some form of logic(usually predicate) and are a relatively new phenomenon(1955 first paper on Loglan. All logical languages I'm aware of are derivatives). Problem with Loglan is that it is proprietary, so that brings us to Lojban. Lojban will probably not be the final solution either as there is still some ambiguity in the lujvo (compound words). A Lojban-Prolog hybrid language is currently being worked on by myself. In predicate logic(as with logical languages) each sentence has a predicate(function .i.e. KLAma). Each predicate takes arguments(SUMti). If you are to type a logical sentence to an inter perter depending on the kind of sentence it can perform different actions. Imperative statement: mu'a(for example) ko FANva zo VALsi meaning: be the translator of word VALsi This isn't really enough information for you or I to give a reply with any certainty as we don't know the language to translate from and the language to translate to, which brings us to. Questions: mu'a .i FANva zo VALsi ma ma meaning: translation of word VALsi into what language from what language? (.e'o(request) make an effort to look at the Lojban, I know it's hard but it's essential for conveying the simplicity with which you can make well articulated unambiguous statements in Lojban that are easy to parse and interpret.) To this question the user could reply: la.ENGlic. la.LOJban. meaning: That which is named ENGlic That which is named LOJban. If the computer has the information about the translation it will return it. If not it will ask the user to fill in the blank by asking another question (mu'a .iFANva fuma) There are almost 1300 root words(GISmu) in Lojban with several hundred CMAvo. For my implementation of the language I will probably remove a large amount of these as they are not necessary(mu'a SOFto which means Soviet) and should really go into name(CMEne) space(mu'a la.SOviet.) The point being, that there are a very finite number of functions that have to be coded in order to allow the computer to be able to interpret and act upon anything being said to it(Lojban is already more expressive than a large amount of Natural Languages) . How is this all going to be programmed? Declarative statements: mu'a FANva zo VALsi la.ENGlic. la.LOJban. zoi.gy. word .gy. meaning the translation of word VALsi to ENGlic from LOJban is word. Now the computer knows this fact (held in a Prolog database until there becomes a logical-speakable language compiler). I will create a version of the interpreter in the lojban-prolog hybrid language (More or less finished Lojban parser written in Prolog, am now working on Lojban-Prolog hybrid language). Yes I know I've dragged this out very far but it was necessary for me to reply to: The idea that very soon we can create a system that can understand its own code Such as the one above described. and start programming itself is ludicrous. Depends on what you see as the goal of programming. If
Re: Re: Re: Re: [agi] A question on the symbol-system hypothesis
On 12/4/06, Mark Waser wrote: Explaining our actions is the reflective part of our minds evaluating the reflexive part of our mind. The reflexive part of our minds, though, operates analogously to a machine running on compiled code with the compilation of code being largely *not* under the control of our conscious mind (though some degree of this *can* be changed by our conscious minds). The more we can correctly interpret and affect/program the reflexive part of our mind with the reflective part, the more intelligent we are. And, translating this back to the machine realm circles back to my initial point, the better the machine can explain it's reasoning and use it's explanation to improve it's future actions, the more intelligent the machine is (or, in reverse, no explanation = no intelligence). Your reasoning is getting surreal. As Ben tried to explain to you, 'explaining our actions' is our consciousness dreaming up excuses for what we want to do anyway. Are you saying that the more excuses we can think up, the more intelligent we are? (Actually there might be something in that!). You seem to have a real difficulty in admitting that humans behave irrationally for a lot (most?) of the time. Don't you read newspapers? You can redefine rationality if you like to say that all the crazy people are behaving rationally within their limited scope, but what's the point? Just admit their behaviour is not rational. Every time someone (subconsciously) decides to do something, their brain presents a list of reasons to go ahead. The reasons against are ignored, or weighted down to be less preferred. This applies to everything from deciding to get a new job to deciding to sleep with your best friend's wife. Sometimes a case arises when you really, really want to do something that you *know* is going to end in disaster, ruined lives, ruined career, etc. and it is impossible to think of good reasons to proceed. But you still go ahead anyway, saying that maybe it won't be so bad, maybe nobody will find out, it's not all my fault anyway, and so on. Human decisions and activities are mostly emotional and irrational. That's the way life is. Because life is uncertain and unpredictable, human decisions are based on best guesses, gambles and basic subconscious desires. An AGI will have to cope with this mess. Basing an AGI on iron logic and 'rationality' alone will lead to what we call 'inhuman' ruthlessness. BillK - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
Re: [agi] The Singularity
John, On 12/5/06, John Scanlon [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I don't believe that the singularity is near, or that it will even occur. I am working very hard at developing real artificial general intelligence, but from what I know, it will not come quickly. It will be slow and incremental. The idea that very soon we can create a system that can understand its own code and start programming itself is ludicrous. First, since my birthday is just a few days off, I'll permit myself an obnoxious reply: grin Ummm... perhaps your skepticism has more to do with the inadequacies of **your own** AGI design than with the limitations of AGI designs in general? /grin Seriously: I agree that progress toward AGI will be incremental, but the question is how long each increment will take. My bet is that progress will seem slow for a while -- and then, all of a sudden, it'll seem shockingly fast. Not necessarily hard takeoff in 5 minutes fast, but at least Wow, this system is getting a lot smarter every single week -- I've lost my urge to go on vacation fast ... leading up to the phase of Suddenly the hard takeoff is a topic for discussion **with the AI system itself** ... According to my understanding of the Novamente design and artificial developmental psychology, the breakthrough from slow to fast incremental progress will occur when the AGI system reaches Piaget's formal stage of development: http://www.agiri.org/wiki/index.php/Formal_Stage At this point, the human child like intuition of the AGI system will be able to synergize with its computer like ability to do formal syntactic analysis, and some really interesting stuff will start to happen (deviating pretty far from our experience with human cognitive development). -- Ben - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
Re: Re: Re: Re: [agi] A question on the symbol-system hypothesis
On 12/5/06, BillK [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Your reasoning is getting surreal. You seem to have a real difficulty in admitting that humans behave irrationally for a lot (most?) of the time. Don't you read newspapers? You can redefine rationality if you like to say that all the crazy people are behaving rationally within their limited scope, but what's the point? Just admit their behaviour is not rational. Human decisions and activities are mostly emotional and irrational. That's the way life is. Because life is uncertain and unpredictable, human decisions are based on best guesses, gambles and basic subconscious desires. What's the point? - I think that's an even better question than defining degrees of local rationality (good) vs irrationality (bad) The whole notion of arbitrarily defining subjective terms as good or better or bad seems foolish. If we're going to talk about evolutionary psychology as a motivator for actions and attribute reactions to stimuli or enviornmental pressures then it seems egocentric to apply labels like rational to any of the observations. Within the scope of these discussions, we put ourselves in a superior non-human point of view where we can discuss the human decisions like animals in a zoo. For some threads it is useful to approach the subject that way. For most it illustrates a particular trait of the biased selection of those humans who participate in this list. hmm... just an observation... - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
Re: [agi] A question on the symbol-system hypothesis
Are you saying that the more excuses we can think up, the more intelligent we are? (Actually there might be something in that!). Sure. Absolutely. I'm perfectly willing to contend that it takes intelligence to come up with excuses and that more intelligent people can come up with more and better excuses. Do you really want to contend the opposite? You seem to have a real difficulty in admitting that humans behave irrationally for a lot (most?) of the time. You're reading something into my statements that I certainly don't mean to be there. Humans behave irrationally a lot of the time. I consider this fact a defect or shortcoming in their intelligence (or make-up). Just because humans have a shortcoming doesn't mean that another intelligence will necessarily have the same shortcoming. Every time someone (subconsciously) decides to do something, their brain presents a list of reasons to go ahead. The reasons against are ignored, or weighted down to be less preferred. This applies to everything from deciding to get a new job to deciding to sleep with your best friend's wife. Sometimes a case arises when you really, really want to do something that you *know* is going to end in disaster, ruined lives, ruined career, etc. and it is impossible to think of good reasons to proceed. But you still go ahead anyway, saying that maybe it won't be so bad, maybe nobody will find out, it's not all my fault anyway, and so on. Yup. Humans are not as intelligent as they could be. Generally, they place way too much weight on near-term effect and not enough weight on long-term effects. Actually, though, I'm not sure whether you classify that as intelligence or wisdom. For many bright people, they *do* know all of what you're saying and they still go ahead. This is certainly some form of defect, I'm not sure where you'd classify it though. Human decisions and activities are mostly emotional and irrational. I think that this depends upon the person. For the majority of humans, maybe -- but I'm not willing to accept this as applying to each individual human that their decisions and activities are mostly emotional and irrational. I believe that there are some humans where this is not the case. That's the way life is. Because life is uncertain and unpredictable, human decisions are based on best guesses, gambles and basic subconscious desires. Yup, we've evolved to be at least minimally functional though not optimal. An AGI will have to cope with this mess. Yes, so far I'm in total agreement with everything you've said . . . . Basing an AGI on iron logic and 'rationality' alone will lead to what we call 'inhuman' ruthlessness. . . . until now where you make an unsupported blanket statement that doesn't appear to me at all related to any of the above (and which may be entirely accurate or inaccurate based upon what you mean by ruthless -- but I believe that it would take a very contorted definition of ruthless to make it accurate -- though inhuman should obviously be accurate). Part of the problem is that 'rationality' is a very emotion-laden term with a very slippery meaning. Is doing something because you really, really want to despite the fact that it most probably will have bad consequences really irrational? It's not a wise choice but irrational is a very strong term . . . . (and, as I pointed out previously, such a decision *is* rationally made if you have bad weighting in your algorithm -- which is effectively what humans have -- or not, since it apparently has been evolutionarily selected for). And logic isn't necessarily so iron if the AGI has built-in biases for conversation and relationships (both of which are rationally derivable from it's own self-interest). I think that you've been watching too much Star Trek where logic and rationality are the opposite of emotion. That just isn't the case. Emotion can be (and is most often noted when it is) contrary to logic and rationality -- but it is equally likely to be congruent with them (and even more so in well-balanced and happy individuals). - Original Message - From: BillK [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: agi@v2.listbox.com Sent: Tuesday, December 05, 2006 7:03 AM Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: [agi] A question on the symbol-system hypothesis On 12/4/06, Mark Waser wrote: Explaining our actions is the reflective part of our minds evaluating the reflexive part of our mind. The reflexive part of our minds, though, operates analogously to a machine running on compiled code with the compilation of code being largely *not* under the control of our conscious mind (though some degree of this *can* be changed by our conscious minds). The more we can correctly interpret and affect/program the reflexive part of our mind with the reflective part, the more intelligent we are. And, translating this back to the machine realm circles back to my initial point, the better the machine can
Re: [agi] A question on the symbol-system hypothesis
Talk about fortuitous timing . . . . here's a link on Marvin Minsky's latest about emotions and rational thought http://www.boston.com/news/globe/health_science/articles/2006/12/04/minsky_talks_about_life_love_in_the_age_of_artificial_intelligence/ The most relevant line to our conversation is Called The Emotion Machine, it argues that, contrary to popular conception, emotions aren't distinct from rational thought; rather, they are simply another way of thinking, one that computers could perform. - Original Message - From: Mark Waser [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: agi@v2.listbox.com Sent: Tuesday, December 05, 2006 10:05 AM Subject: Re: [agi] A question on the symbol-system hypothesis Are you saying that the more excuses we can think up, the more intelligent we are? (Actually there might be something in that!). Sure. Absolutely. I'm perfectly willing to contend that it takes intelligence to come up with excuses and that more intelligent people can come up with more and better excuses. Do you really want to contend the opposite? You seem to have a real difficulty in admitting that humans behave irrationally for a lot (most?) of the time. You're reading something into my statements that I certainly don't mean to be there. Humans behave irrationally a lot of the time. I consider this fact a defect or shortcoming in their intelligence (or make-up). Just because humans have a shortcoming doesn't mean that another intelligence will necessarily have the same shortcoming. Every time someone (subconsciously) decides to do something, their brain presents a list of reasons to go ahead. The reasons against are ignored, or weighted down to be less preferred. This applies to everything from deciding to get a new job to deciding to sleep with your best friend's wife. Sometimes a case arises when you really, really want to do something that you *know* is going to end in disaster, ruined lives, ruined career, etc. and it is impossible to think of good reasons to proceed. But you still go ahead anyway, saying that maybe it won't be so bad, maybe nobody will find out, it's not all my fault anyway, and so on. Yup. Humans are not as intelligent as they could be. Generally, they place way too much weight on near-term effect and not enough weight on long-term effects. Actually, though, I'm not sure whether you classify that as intelligence or wisdom. For many bright people, they *do* know all of what you're saying and they still go ahead. This is certainly some form of defect, I'm not sure where you'd classify it though. Human decisions and activities are mostly emotional and irrational. I think that this depends upon the person. For the majority of humans, maybe -- but I'm not willing to accept this as applying to each individual human that their decisions and activities are mostly emotional and irrational. I believe that there are some humans where this is not the case. That's the way life is. Because life is uncertain and unpredictable, human decisions are based on best guesses, gambles and basic subconscious desires. Yup, we've evolved to be at least minimally functional though not optimal. An AGI will have to cope with this mess. Yes, so far I'm in total agreement with everything you've said . . . . Basing an AGI on iron logic and 'rationality' alone will lead to what we call 'inhuman' ruthlessness. . . . until now where you make an unsupported blanket statement that doesn't appear to me at all related to any of the above (and which may be entirely accurate or inaccurate based upon what you mean by ruthless -- but I believe that it would take a very contorted definition of ruthless to make it accurate -- though inhuman should obviously be accurate). Part of the problem is that 'rationality' is a very emotion-laden term with a very slippery meaning. Is doing something because you really, really want to despite the fact that it most probably will have bad consequences really irrational? It's not a wise choice but irrational is a very strong term . . . . (and, as I pointed out previously, such a decision *is* rationally made if you have bad weighting in your algorithm -- which is effectively what humans have -- or not, since it apparently has been evolutionarily selected for). And logic isn't necessarily so iron if the AGI has built-in biases for conversation and relationships (both of which are rationally derivable from it's own self-interest). I think that you've been watching too much Star Trek where logic and rationality are the opposite of emotion. That just isn't the case. Emotion can be (and is most often noted when it is) contrary to logic and rationality -- but it is equally likely to be congruent with them (and even more so in well-balanced and happy individuals). - Original Message - From: BillK [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: agi@v2.listbox.com
Re: Re: Re: Re: [agi] A question on the symbol-system hypothesis
BillK [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 12/4/06, Mark Waser wrote: Explaining our actions is the reflective part of our minds evaluating the reflexive part of our mind. The reflexive part of our minds, though, operates analogously to a machine running on compiled code with the compilation of code being largely *not* under the control of our conscious mind (though some degree of this *can* be changed by our conscious minds). The more we can correctly interpret and affect/program the reflexive part of our mind with the reflective part, the more intelligent we are. And, translating this back to the machine realm circles back to my initial point, the better the machine can explain it's reasoning and use it's explanation to improve it's future actions, the more intelligent the machine is (or, in reverse, no explanation = no intelligence). Your reasoning is getting surreal. As Ben tried to explain to you, 'explaining our actions' is our consciousness dreaming up excuses for what we want to do anyway. Are you saying that the more excuses we can think up, the more intelligent we are? (Actually there might be something in that!). You seem to have a real difficulty in admitting that humans behave irrationally for a lot (most?) of the time. Don't you read newspapers? You can redefine rationality if you like to say that all the crazy people are behaving rationally within their limited scope, but what's the point? Just admit their behaviour is not rational. Every time someone (subconsciously) decides to do something, their brain presents a list of reasons to go ahead. The reasons against are ignored, or weighted down to be less preferred. This applies to everything from deciding to get a new job to deciding to sleep with your best friend's wife. Sometimes a case arises when you really, really want to do something that you *know* is going to end in disaster, ruined lives, ruined career, etc. and it is impossible to think of good reasons to proceed. But you still go ahead anyway, saying that maybe it won't be so bad, maybe nobody will find out, it's not all my fault anyway, and so on. Human decisions and activities are mostly emotional and irrational. That's the way life is. Because life is uncertain and unpredictable, human decisions are based on best guesses, gambles and basic subconscious desires. An AGI will have to cope with this mess. Basing an AGI on iron logic and 'rationality' alone will lead to what we call 'inhuman' ruthlessness. BillK You just rationlized the reasons for human choice in your above arguement yourself :} MOST humans act rationaly MOST of the time. They may not make 'good' decisions, but they are rational ones, if you decides to sleep with your best friends wife, you do so because you are attracted and you want her, and you rationlize you will probably not get caught. You have stated the reasons, and you move ahead with that plan. Vague stuff you cant rationalize easily is why you like the appearance of someones face, or why you like this flavor of ice cream. Those are hard to rationalize, but much of our behaviour is easier. Now about building a rational vs non-rational AGI, how would you go about modeling a non-rational part of it? Short of a random number generator? For the most part we Do want a rational AGI, and it DOES need to explain itself. One fo the first tasks of AGI will be to replace all of the current expert systems in fields like medicine. For these it is not merely good enough to say, (as a Doctor AGI) I think he has this cancer, and you should treat him with this strange procedure. There must be an accounting that it can present to other doctors and say, yes, I noticed a coorelation between these factors that lead me to believe this, with this certainty. An early AI must also proove its merit by explaining what it is doing to build up a level of trust. Further, it is important in another fashion, in that we can turn around and use these smart AI's to further train other Doctors or specialists with the AGI's explainations. Now for some tasks it will not be able to do this, or not within a small amount of data and explanations. The level that it is able to generalize this information will reflect its usefullness and possibly intelligence. In the Halo expirement for the Chemistry API, they were graded not only on correct answers but also in their explanations of how they got to those answers. Some of the explanations were short concise and well reasoned, some fo them though, went down to a very basic level of detail and lasted for a couple of pages. If you are flying to Austin, and asking a AGI to plan your route, and it chooses a Airline that sounds dodgy that you have never heard of, mainly because it was cheap or some other reasoning, you def want to know why it choose that, and tell it not to weight that feature as highly. For many decisions I believe a small feature set is required, with the larger
Re: [agi] The Singularity
John Scanlon wrote: Alright, I have to say this. I don't believe that the singularity is near, or that it will even occur. I am working very hard at developing real artificial general intelligence, but from what I know, it will not come quickly. It will be slow and incremental. The idea that very soon we can create a system that can understand its own code and start programming itself is ludicrous. Any arguments? Back in 17th century Europe, people stood at the end of a long period of history (basically, all of previous history) during which curious humans had tried to understand how the world worked, but had largely failed to make substantial progress. They had been suffering from an attitude problem: there was something about their entire way of approaching the knowledge-discovery process that was wrong. We now characterize their fault as being the lack of an objective scientific method. Then, all of a sudden, people got it. Once it started happening, it spread like wildfire. Then it went into overdrive when Isaac Newton cross-bred the new attitude with a vigorous dose of mathematical invention. My point? That you can keep banging the rocks together for a very long time and feel like you are just getting nowhere, but then all of a sudden you can do something as simple as change your attitude or your methodology slightly, and wham!, everything starts happening at once. For what it is worth, I do not buy most of Kurzweil's arguments about the general progress of the technology curves. I don't believe in that argument for the singularity at all, I believe that it will happen for a specific technological reason. I think that there is something wrong with the attitude we have been adopting toward AI research, which is comparable to the attitude problem that divided the pre- and post-Enlightenment periods. I have summarized a part of this argument in the paper that I wrote for the first AGIRI workshop. The argument in that paper can be summarized as: the first 30 years of AI was all about scruffy engineering, then the second 20 years of AI was all about neat mathematics, but because of the complex systems problem neither of these approaches would be expected to work, and what we need instead is a new attitude that is neither engineering nor math, but science. [This paper is due to be published in the AGIRI proceedings next year, but if anyone wants to contact me I will be able to send a not-for-circulation copy]. However, there is another, more broad-ranging way to look at the present situation, and that is that we have three research communities who do not communicate with one another: AI Programmers, Cognitive Scientists (or Cognitive Psychologists) and Software Engineers. What we need is a new science that merges these areas in a way that is NOT a lowest common denominator kind of merge. We need people who truly understand all of them, not cross-travelling experts who mostly reside in one and (with the best will in world) think they know enough about the others. This merging of the fields has never happened before. More importantly, the specific technical issue related to the complex systems problem (the need for science, rather than engineering or math) has also never been fully appreciated before. Everything I say in this post may be wrong, but one thing is for sure: this new approach/attitude has not been tried before, so the consequences of taking it seriously and trying it are lying out there in the future, completely unknown. I believe that this is something we just don't get yet. When we do, I think we will start to see the last fifty years of AI research as equivalent to the era before 1665. I think that AI will start to take off in at breathtaking speed once the new attitude finally clicks. The one thing that stops it from happening is the ego problem. Too many people with too much invested in the supremacy they have within their own domain. Frankly, I think it might only start to happen if we can take some people fresh out of high school and get them through a completely new curriculum, then get 'em through their Ph.D.s before they realise that all of the existing communities are going to treat them like lepers because they refuse to play the game. ;-) But that would only take six years. After we get it, in other words, *that* is when the singularity starts to happen. If, on the other hand, all we have is the present approach to AI then I tend to agree with you John: ludicrous. Richard Loosemore - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
Re: Re: [agi] The Singularity
If, on the other hand, all we have is the present approach to AI then I tend to agree with you John: ludicrous. Richard Loosemore IMO it is not sensible to speak of the present approach to AI There are a lot of approaches out there... not an orthodoxy by any means... -- Ben G - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
Re: [agi] A question on the symbol-system hypothesis
Now about building a rational vs non-rational AGI, how would you go about modeling a non-rational part of it? Short of a random number generator? Why would you want to build a non-rational AGI? It seems like a *really* bad idea. I think I'm missing your point here. For the most part we Do want a rational AGI, and it DOES need to explain itself. One fo the first tasks of AGI will be to replace all of the current expert systems in fields like medicine. Yep. That's my argument and you expand it well. Now for some tasks it will not be able to do this, or not within a small amount of data and explanations. The level that it is able to generalize this information will reflect its usefullness and possibly intelligence. Yep. You're saying exactly what I'm thinking. For many decisions I believe a small feature set is required, with the larger possible features being so lowly weighted as to not have much impact. This is where Ben and I are sort of having a debate. I agree with him that the brain may well be using the larger number since it is massively parallel and it therefore can. I think that we differ on whether or not the larger is required for AGI (Me = No, Ben = Yes) -- which reminds me . . . Hey Ben, if the larger number IS required for AGI, how do you intend to do this in a computationally feasible way in a non-massively-parallel system? - Original Message - From: James Ratcliff To: agi@v2.listbox.com Sent: Tuesday, December 05, 2006 11:17 AM Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: [agi] A question on the symbol-system hypothesis BillK [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 12/4/06, Mark Waser wrote: Explaining our actions is the reflective part of our minds evaluating the reflexive part of our mind. The reflexive part of our minds, though, operates analogously to a machine running on compiled code with the compilation of code being largely *not* under the control of our conscious mind (though some degree of this *can* be changed by our conscious minds). The more we can correctly interpret and affect/program the reflexive part of our mind with the reflective part, the more intelligent we are. And, translating this back to the machine realm circles back to my initial point, the better the machine can explain it's reasoning and use it's explanation to improve it's future actions, the more intelligent the machine is (or, in reverse, no explanation = no intelligence). Your reasoning is getting surreal. As Ben tried to explain to you, 'explaining our actions' is our consciousness dreaming up excuses for what we want to do anyway. Are you saying that the more excuses we can think up, the more intelligent we are? (Actually there might be something in that!). You seem to have a real difficulty in admitting that humans behave irrationally for a lot (most?) of the time. Don't you read newspapers? You can redefine rationality if you like to say that all the crazy people are behaving rationally within their limited scope, but what's the point? Just admit their behaviour is not rational. Every time someone (subconsciously) decides to do something, their brain presents a list of reasons to go ahead. The reasons against are ignored, or weighted down to be less preferred. This applies to everything from deciding to get a new job to deciding to sleep with your best friend's wife. Sometimes a case arises when you really, really want to do something that you *know* is going to end in disaster, ruined lives, ruined career, etc. and it is impossible to think of good reasons to proceed. But you still go ahead anyway, saying that maybe it won't be so bad, maybe nobody will find out, it's not all my fault anyway, and so on. Human decisions and activities are mostly emotional and irrational. That's the way life is. Because life is uncertain and unpredictable, human decisions are based on best guesses, gambles and basic subconscious desires. An AGI will have to cope with this mess. Basing an AGI on iron logic and 'rationality' alone will lead to what we call 'inhuman' ruthlessness. BillK You just rationlized the reasons for human choice in your above arguement yourself :} MOST humans act rationaly MOST of the time. They may not make 'good' decisions, but they are rational ones, if you decides to sleep with your best friends wife, you do so because you are attracted and you want her, and you rationlize you will probably not get caught. You have stated the reasons, and you move ahead with that plan. Vague stuff you cant rationalize easily is why you like the appearance of someones face, or why you like this flavor of ice cream. Those are hard to rationalize, but much of our behaviour is easier. Now about building a rational vs non-rational AGI, how would you go about
Re: [agi] A question on the symbol-system hypothesis
Mark Waser [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Are you saying that the more excuses we can think up, the more intelligent we are? (Actually there might be something in that!). Sure. Absolutely. I'm perfectly willing to contend that it takes intelligence to come up with excuses and that more intelligent people can come up with more and better excuses. Do you really want to contend the opposite? You seem to have a real difficulty in admitting that humans behave irrationally for a lot (most?) of the time. You're reading something into my statements that I certainly don't mean to be there. Humans behave irrationally a lot of the time. I consider this fact a defect or shortcoming in their intelligence (or make-up). Just because humans have a shortcoming doesn't mean that another intelligence will necessarily have the same shortcoming. Every time someone (subconsciously) decides to do something, their brain presents a list of reasons to go ahead. The reasons against are ignored, or weighted down to be less preferred. This applies to everything from deciding to get a new job to deciding to sleep with your best friend's wife. Sometimes a case arises when you really, really want to do something that you *know* is going to end in disaster, ruined lives, ruined career, etc. and it is impossible to think of good reasons to proceed. But you still go ahead anyway, saying that maybe it won't be so bad, maybe nobody will find out, it's not all my fault anyway, and so on. Yup. Humans are not as intelligent as they could be. Generally, they place way too much weight on near-term effect and not enough weight on long-term effects. Actually, though, I'm not sure whether you classify that as intelligence or wisdom. For many bright people, they *do* know all of what you're saying and they still go ahead. This is certainly some form of defect, I'm not sure where you'd classify it though. Human decisions and activities are mostly emotional and irrational. I think that this depends upon the person. For the majority of humans, maybe -- but I'm not willing to accept this as applying to each individual human that their decisions and activities are mostly emotional and irrational. I believe that there are some humans where this is not the case. That's the way life is. Because life is uncertain and unpredictable, human decisions are based on best guesses, gambles and basic subconscious desires. Yup, we've evolved to be at least minimally functional though not optimal. An AGI will have to cope with this mess. Yes, so far I'm in total agreement with everything you've said . . . . Basing an AGI on iron logic and 'rationality' alone will lead to what we call 'inhuman' ruthlessness. . . . until now where you make an unsupported blanket statement that doesn't appear to me at all related to any of the above (and which may be entirely accurate or inaccurate based upon what you mean by ruthless -- but I believe that it would take a very contorted definition of ruthless to make it accurate -- though inhuman should obviously be accurate). Part of the problem is that 'rationality' is a very emotion-laden term with a very slippery meaning. Is doing something because you really, really want to despite the fact that it most probably will have bad consequences really irrational? It's not a wise choice but irrational is a very strong term . . . . (and, as I pointed out previously, such a decision *is* rationally made if you have bad weighting in your algorithm -- which is effectively what humans have -- or not, since it apparently has been evolutionarily selected for). And logic isn't necessarily so iron if the AGI has built-in biases for conversation and relationships (both of which are rationally derivable from it's own self-interest). I think that you've been watching too much Star Trek where logic and rationality are the opposite of emotion. That just isn't the case. Emotion can be (and is most often noted when it is) contrary to logic and rationality -- but it is equally likely to be congruent with them (and even more so in well-balanced and happy individuals). You have hinted around it, but I would go one step further and say that Emotion is NOT contrary to logic. In any way really, they cant be compared like that. Logic even 'uses' emotion as imput. The decisions we make are based on rules and facts we know, and our emotions, but still logically. What emotions often contradict is our actual ability to make good decicions / plans. If we do something stupid because of our anger or emotions, then it still is a causal logical explanation. So humand and AGI may be irrational, but hopefully not illogical. If it is illogical then that implies it made its decision without any logical reasoning, so possibly random. AGI will need some level of randomness, but not for general things. James Ratcliff ___ James
Re: [agi] A question on the symbol-system hypothesis
You have hinted around it, but I would go one step further and say that Emotion is NOT contrary to logic. :-) I thought that my last statement that emotion is equally likely to be congruent with logic and reason was a lot more than a hint (unless congruent doesn't mean not contrary like I think/thought it did :-) I liked your distinction between illogical and irrational -- though I'm not sure that others would agree with your using irrational that way. - Original Message - From: James Ratcliff To: agi@v2.listbox.com Sent: Tuesday, December 05, 2006 11:34 AM Subject: Re: [agi] A question on the symbol-system hypothesis Mark Waser [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Are you saying that the more excuses we can think up, the more intelligent we are? (Actually there might be something in that!). Sure. Absolutely. I'm perfectly willing to contend that it takes intelligence to come up with excuses and that more intelligent people can come up with more and better excuses. Do you really want to contend the opposite? You seem to have a real difficulty in admitting that humans behave irrationally for a lot (most?) of the time. You're reading something into my statements that I certainly don't mean to be there. Humans behave irrationally a lot of the time. I consider this fact a defect or shortcoming in their intelligence (or make-up). Just because humans have a shortcoming doesn't mean that another intelligence will necessarily have the same shortcoming. Every time someone (subconsciously) decides to do something, their brain presents a list of reasons to go ahead. The reasons against are ignored, or weighted down to be less preferred. This applies to everything from deciding to get a new job to deciding to sleep with your best friend's wife. Sometimes a case arises when you really, really want to do something that you *know* is going to end in disaster, ruined lives, ruined career, etc. and it is impossible to think of good reasons to proceed. But you still go ahead anyway, saying that maybe it won't be so bad, maybe nobody will find out, it's not all my fault anyway, and so on. Yup. Humans are not as intelligent as they could be. Generally, they place way too much weight on near-term effect and not enough weight on long-term effects. Actually, though, I'm not sure whether you classify that as intelligence or wisdom. For many bright people, they *do* know all of what you're saying and they still go ahead. This is certainly some form of defect, I'm not sure where you'd classify it though. Human decisions and activities are mostly emotional and irrational. I think that this depends upon the person. For the majority of humans, maybe -- but I'm not willing to accept this as applying to each individual human that their decisions and activities are mostly emotional and irrational. I believe that there are some humans where this is not the case. That's the way life is. Because life is uncertain and unpredictable, human decisions are based on best guesses, gambles and basic subconscious desires. Yup, we've evolved to be at least minimally functional though not optimal. An AGI will have to cope with this mess. Yes, so far I'm in total agreement with everything you've said . . . . Basing an AGI on iron logic and 'rationality' alone will lead to what we call 'inhuman' ruthlessness. . . . until now where you make an unsupported blanket statement that doesn't appear to me at all related to any of the above (and which may be entirely accurate or inaccurate based upon what you mean by ruthless -- but I believe that it would take a very contorted definition of ruthless to make it accurate -- though inhuman should obviously be accurate). Part of the problem is that 'rationality' is a very emotion-laden term with a very slippery meaning. Is doing something because you really, really want to despite the fact that it most probably will have bad consequences really irrational? It's not a wise choice but irrational is a very strong term . . . . (and, as I pointed out previously, such a decision *is* rationally made if you have bad weighting in your algorithm -- which is effectively what humans have -- or not, since it apparently has been evolutionarily selected for). And logic isn't necessarily so iron if the AGI has built-in biases for conversation and relationships (both of which are rationally derivable from it's own self-interest). I think that you've been watching too much Star Trek where logic and rationality are the opposite of emotion. That just isn't the case. Emotion can be (and is most often noted when it is) contrary to logic and rationality -- but it is equally likely to
Re: [agi] A question on the symbol-system hypothesis
Yes, I could not find a decent definition of irrational at first: Amending my statements now... Using the Wiki basis below: the term is used to describe thinking and actions which are, or appear to be, less useful or logical than the rational alternatives. I would remove the 'logical' portion of this, because the examples given below, emotions, fads, stock markets. These decisions are all made useing logic, with emotions contirbuting to a choice, or a choice being made because we see others wearing the same clothes, or based on our (possibly incorrect) beliefs about what the stock market may do. The other possibility is to actually incorrectly use the knowledge. If I have all the rules about a stock that would point to it going down, but I still purchase and believe it will go up, I am using the logic incorrectly. So possibly irrationality could be amended to be something like: basing a decision on faulty information, or incorrectly using logic to arrive at a choice. So for my AGI application, I would indeed then model the irrationality in the form of emotions / fads etc, as logical components, and it would implicity be irrational becuase it could have faulty information. And incorrectly using the logic it has, would only be done if there was an error. James Theories of irrational behavior include: people's actual interests differ from what they believe to be their interests This is still logical though, just based on beliefs that are wrong to actual interests. From Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrationality Irrationality is talking or acting without regard of rationality. Usually pejorative, the term is used to describe thinking and actions which are, or appear to be, less useful or logical than the rational alternatives. These actions tend to be regarded as emotion-driven. There is a clear tendency to view our own thoughts, words, and actions as rational and to see those who disagree as irrational. Types of behavior which are often described as irrational include: fads and fashions crowd behavior offense or anger at a situation that has not yet occurred unrealistic expectations falling victim to confidence tricks belief in the supernatural without evidence stock-market bubbles irrationality caused by mental illness, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder, major depressive disorder, and paranoia. Mark Waser [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:You have hinted around it, but I would go one step further and say that Emotion is NOT contrary to logic. :-) I thought that my last statement that emotion is equally likely to be congruent with logic and reason was a lot more than a hint (unless congruent doesn't mean not contrary like I think/thought it did :-) I liked your distinction between illogical and irrational -- though I'm not sure that others would agree with your using irrational that way. - Original Message - From:James Ratcliff To: agi@v2.listbox.com Sent: Tuesday, December 05, 2006 11:34AM Subject: Re: [agi] A question on thesymbol-system hypothesis Mark Waser [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Are you saying that the more excuses we can think up, the more intelligent we are? (Actually there might be something in that!). Sure. Absolutely. I'm perfectly willing to contend that it takes intelligence to come up with excuses and that more intelligent people can come up with more and better excuses. Do you really want to contend the opposite? You seem to have a real difficulty in admitting that humans behave irrationally for a lot (most?) of the time. You're reading something into my statements that I certainly don't mean to be there. Humans behave irrationally a lot of the time. I consider this fact a defect or shortcoming in their intelligence (or make-up). Just because humans have a shortcoming doesn't mean that another intelligence will necessarily have the same shortcoming. Every time someone (subconsciously) decides to do something, their brain presents a list of reasons to go ahead. The reasons against are ignored, or weighted down to be less preferred. This applies to everything from deciding to get a new job to deciding to sleep with your best friend's wife. Sometimes a case arises when you really, really want to do something that you *know* is going to end in disaster, ruined lives, ruined career, etc. and it is impossible to think of good reasons to proceed. But you still go ahead anyway, saying that maybe it won't be so bad, maybe nobody will find out, it's not all my fault anyway, and so on. Yup. Humans are not as intelligent as they could be. Generally, they place way too much weight on near-term effect and not enough weight on long-term effects. Actually, though, I'm not sure whether you classify that as
Re: [agi] The Singularity
Ummm... perhaps your skepticism has more to do with the inadequacies of **your own** AGI design than with the limitations of AGI designs in general? It has been my experience that one's expectations on the future of AI/Singularity is directly dependent upon one's understanding/design of AGI and intelligence in general. On 12/5/06, Ben Goertzel [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: John, On 12/5/06, John Scanlon [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I don't believe that the singularity is near, or that it will even occur. I am working very hard at developing real artificial general intelligence, but from what I know, it will not come quickly. It will be slow and incremental. The idea that very soon we can create a system that can understand its own code and start programming itself is ludicrous. First, since my birthday is just a few days off, I'll permit myself an obnoxious reply: grin Ummm... perhaps your skepticism has more to do with the inadequacies of **your own** AGI design than with the limitations of AGI designs in general? /grin Seriously: I agree that progress toward AGI will be incremental, but the question is how long each increment will take. My bet is that progress will seem slow for a while -- and then, all of a sudden, it'll seem shockingly fast. Not necessarily hard takeoff in 5 minutes fast, but at least Wow, this system is getting a lot smarter every single week -- I've lost my urge to go on vacation fast ... leading up to the phase of Suddenly the hard takeoff is a topic for discussion **with the AI system itself** ... According to my understanding of the Novamente design and artificial developmental psychology, the breakthrough from slow to fast incremental progress will occur when the AGI system reaches Piaget's formal stage of development: http://www.agiri.org/wiki/index.php/Formal_Stage At this point, the human child like intuition of the AGI system will be able to synergize with its computer like ability to do formal syntactic analysis, and some really interesting stuff will start to happen (deviating pretty far from our experience with human cognitive development). -- Ben - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303 - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
Re: Marvin and The Emotion Machine [WAS Re: [agi] A question on the symbol-system hypothesis]
On 12/5/06, Richard Loosemore wrote: There are so few people who speak up against the conventional attitude to the [rational AI/irrational humans] idea, it is such a relief to hear any of them speak out. I don't know yet if I buy everything Minsky says, but I know I agree with the spirit of it. Minsky and Hofstadter are the two AI thinkers I most respect. The customer reviews on Amazon are rather critical of Minsky's new book. They seem to be complaining that the book is more of a general discussion rather than providing detailed specifications for building an AI engine. :) http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/customer-reviews/0743276639/ref=cm_cr_dp_pt/102-3984994-3498561?ie=UTF8n=283155s=books The good news is that Minsky appears to be making the book available online at present on his web site. *Download quick!* http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/ See under publications, chapters 1 to 9. The Emotion Machine 9/6/2006( 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 ) I like very much Minsky's summing up from the end of the book: - All of these kinds of inventiveness, combined with our unique expressiveness, have empowered our communities to deal with huge classes of new situations. The previous chapters discussed many aspects of what gives people so much resourcefulness: We have multiple ways to describe many things—and can quickly switch among those different perspectives. We make memory-records of what we've done—so that later we can reflect on them. We learn multiple ways to think so that when one of them fails, we can switch to another. We split hard problems into smaller parts, and use goal-trees, plans, and context stacks to help us keep making progress. We develop ways to control our minds with all sorts of incentives, threats, and bribes. We have many different ways to learn and can also learn new ways to learn. We can often postpone a dangerous action and imagine, instead, what its outcome might be in some Virtual World. Our language and culture accumulates vast stores of ideas that were discovered by our ancestors. We represent these in multiple realms, with metaphors interconnecting them. Most every process in the brain is linked to some other processes. So, while any particular process may have some deficiencies, there will frequently be other parts that can intervene to compensate. Nevertheless, our minds still have bugs. For, as our human brains evolved, each seeming improvement also exposed us to the dangers making new types of mistakes. Thus, at present, our wonderful powers to make abstractions also cause us to construct generalizations that are too broad, fail to deal with exceptions to rules, accumulate useless or incorrect information, and to believe things because our imprimers do. We also make superstitious credit assignments, in which we confuse real thing with ones that we merely imagine; then we become obsessed with unachievable goals, and set out on unbalanced, fanatical searches and quests. Some persons become so unwilling to acknowledge a serious failure or a great loss that they try to relive their lives of the past. Also, of course, many people suffer from mental disorders that range from minor incapacities to dangerous states of dismal depression or mania. We cannot expect our species to evolve ways to escape from all such bugs because, as every engineer knows, as every engineer knows, most every change in a large complex system will introduce yet other mistakes that won't show up till the system moves to a different environment. Furthermore, we also face an additional problem: each human brain differs from the next because, first, it is built by pairs of inherited genes, each chosen by chance from one of its parent's such pairs. Then, during the early development of each brain, many other smaller details depend on other, small accidental events. An engineer might wonder how such machines could possibly work, in spite of so many possible variations. To explain how such large systems could function reliably, quite a few thinkers have suggested that our brains must be based on some not-yet-understood 'holistic' principles, according to which every fragment of process or knowledge is 'distributed' (in some unknown global way) so that the system still could function well in spite of the loss of any part of it because such systems act as though they were more than the sums of all their parts. However, the arguments in this book suggest that we do not need to look for any such magical tricks—because we have so many ways to accomplish each job that we can tolerate the failure of many particular parts, simply by switching to using alternative ones. (In other words, we function well because we can perform with far less than the sum of all of our parts.) Furthermore, it makes sense to suppose that many of the parts of our brains are involved with helping to correct or suppress the effects of defects and bugs in other parts. This means that we will find it hard to
Re: [agi] The Singularity
Ben Goertzel wrote: ... According to my understanding of the Novamente design and artificial developmental psychology, the breakthrough from slow to fast incremental progress will occur when the AGI system reaches Piaget's formal stage of development: http://www.agiri.org/wiki/index.php/Formal_Stage At this point, the human child like intuition of the AGI system will be able to synergize with its computer like ability to do formal syntactic analysis, and some really interesting stuff will start to happen (deviating pretty far from our experience with human cognitive development). -- Ben I do, however, have some question about it being a hard takeoff. That depends largely on 1) how efficient the program is, and 2) what computer resources are available. To me it seems quite plausible that an AGI might start out as slightly less intelligent than a normal person, or even considerably less intelligent, with the limitation being due to the available computer time. Naturally, this would change fairly rapidly over time, but not exponentially so, or at least not super-exponentially so. If, however, the singularity is delayed because the programs aren't ready, or are too inefficient, then we might see a true hard-takeoff. In that case by the time the program was ready, the computer resources that it needs would already be plentifully available. This isn't impossible, if the program comes into existence in a few decades, but if the program comes into existence within the current decade, then there would be a soft-takeoff. If it comes into existence within the next half-decade then I would expect the original AGI to be sub-normal, due to lack of available resources. Naturally all of this is dependent on many different things. If Vista really does require as much of and immense retooling to more powerful computers as some predict, then programs that aren't dependent on Vista will have more resources available, as computer designs are forced to be faster and more capacious. (Wasn't Intel promising 50 cores on a single chip in a decade? If each of those cores is as capable as a current single core, then it will take far fewer computers netted together to pool the same computing capacity...for those programs so structured as to use the capacity.) - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
Re: [agi] The Singularity
On 12/5/06, Richard Loosemore [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Ben Goertzel wrote: If, on the other hand, all we have is the present approach to AI then I tend to agree with you John: ludicrous. Richard Loosemore IMO it is not sensible to speak of the present approach to AI There are a lot of approaches out there... not an orthodoxy by any means... I'm aware of the different approaches, and of how very, very different they are from one another. But by contrast with the approach I am advocating, they all look like orthodoxy. There is a *big* difference between the two sets of ideas. In that context, and only in that context, it makes sense to talk about the present approach to AI. Richard Loosemore. Is there anywhere I could find a list and description of these different kinds of AI?.a'u(interest) I'm sure I could learn a lot as I'm rather new to the f ield. I'm in Second year undergard, Majoring in Cognitive Sciences, Specializing in Artificial Intelligence, York University, Toronto, Canada. So I think such a list would be very beneficial for beginners like me .ui(happiness) ki'e(thanks) in advance. -- ta'o(by the way) more on Lojban: http://lojban.org mu'oimi'e lOkadin (Over, my name is lOkadin) - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
Re: [agi] A question on the symbol-system hypothesis
BillK wrote: ... Every time someone (subconsciously) decides to do something, their brain presents a list of reasons to go ahead. The reasons against are ignored, or weighted down to be less preferred. This applies to everything from deciding to get a new job to deciding to sleep with your best friend's wife. Sometimes a case arises when you really, really want to do something that you *know* is going to end in disaster, ruined lives, ruined career, etc. and it is impossible to think of good reasons to proceed. But you still go ahead anyway, saying that maybe it won't be so bad, maybe nobody will find out, it's not all my fault anyway, and so on. ... BillK I think you've got a time inversion here. The list of reasons to go ahead is frequently, or even usually, created AFTER the action has been done. If the list is being created BEFORE the decision, the list of reasons not to go ahead isn't ignored. Both lists are weighed, a decision is made, and AFTER the decision is made the reasons decided against have their weights reduced. If, OTOH, the decision is made BEFORE the list of reasons is created, then the list doesn't *get* created until one starts trying to justify the action, and for justification obviously reasons not to have done the thing are useless...except as a layer of whitewash to prove that all eventualities were considered. For most decisions one never bothers to verbalize why it was, or was not, done. P.S.: ...and AFTER the decision is made the reasons decided against have their weights reduced. ...: This is to reinforce a consistent self-image. If, eventually, the decision turns our to have been the wrong one, then this must be revoked, and the alternative list reinforced. At which point one's self-image changes and one says things like I don't know WHY I would have done that, because the modified self image would not have decided in that way. P.P.S: THIS IS FABULATION. I'm explaining what I think happens, but I have no actual evidence of the truth of my assertions. - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
Re: [agi] The Singularity
See http://www.agiri.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=44 and http://www.cis.temple.edu/~pwang/203-AI/Lecture/AGI.htm Pei On 12/5/06, Andrii (lOkadin) Zvorygin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Is there anywhere I could find a list and description of these different kinds of AI?.a'u(interest) I'm sure I could learn a lot as I'm rather new to the f ield. I'm in Second year undergard, Majoring in Cognitive Sciences, Specializing in Artificial Intelligence, York University, Toronto, Canada. So I think such a list would be very beneficial for beginners like me .ui(happiness) ki'e(thanks) in advance. -- ta'o(by the way) more on Lojban: http://lojban.org mu'oimi'e lOkadin (Over, my name is lOkadin) - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303 - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
Re: [agi] A question on the symbol-system hypothesis
On 12/5/06, Charles D Hixson wrote: BillK wrote: ... Every time someone (subconsciously) decides to do something, their brain presents a list of reasons to go ahead. The reasons against are ignored, or weighted down to be less preferred. This applies to everything from deciding to get a new job to deciding to sleep with your best friend's wife. Sometimes a case arises when you really, really want to do something that you *know* is going to end in disaster, ruined lives, ruined career, etc. and it is impossible to think of good reasons to proceed. But you still go ahead anyway, saying that maybe it won't be so bad, maybe nobody will find out, it's not all my fault anyway, and so on. ... BillK I think you've got a time inversion here. The list of reasons to go ahead is frequently, or even usually, created AFTER the action has been done. If the list is being created BEFORE the decision, the list of reasons not to go ahead isn't ignored. Both lists are weighed, a decision is made, and AFTER the decision is made the reasons decided against have their weights reduced. If, OTOH, the decision is made BEFORE the list of reasons is created, then the list doesn't *get* created until one starts trying to justify the action, and for justification obviously reasons not to have done the thing are useless...except as a layer of whitewash to prove that all eventualities were considered. For most decisions one never bothers to verbalize why it was, or was not, done. No time inversion intended. What I intended to say was that most (all?) decisions are made subconsciously before the conscious mind starts its reason / excuse generation process. The conscious mind pretending to weigh various reasons is just a human conceit. This feature was necessary in early evolution for survival. When danger threatened, immediate action was required. Flee or fight! No time to consider options with the new-fangled consciousness brain mechanism that evolution was developing. With the luxury of having plenty of time to reason about decisions, our consciousness can now play its reasoning games to justify what subconsciously has already been decided. NOTE: This is probably an exaggeration / simplification. ;) BillK - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
Re: [agi] A question on the symbol-system hypothesis
BillK wrote: On 12/5/06, Charles D Hixson wrote: BillK wrote: ... No time inversion intended. What I intended to say was that most (all?) decisions are made subconsciously before the conscious mind starts its reason / excuse generation process. The conscious mind pretending to weigh various reasons is just a human conceit. This feature was necessary in early evolution for survival. When danger threatened, immediate action was required. Flee or fight! No time to consider options with the new-fangled consciousness brain mechanism that evolution was developing. With the luxury of having plenty of time to reason about decisions, our consciousness can now play its reasoning games to justify what subconsciously has already been decided. NOTE: This is probably an exaggeration / simplification. ;) BillK I would say that all decisions are made subconsciously, but that the conscious mind can focus attention onto various parts of the problem and possibly affect the weighings of the factors. I would also make a distinction between the conscious mind and the verbalized elements, which are merely the story that the conscious mind is telling. (And assert that ALL of the stories that we tell ourselves are human conceits, i.e., abstractions of parts deemed significant out of a much more complex underlying process.) I've started reading What is Thought by Eric Baum. So far I'm only into the second chapter, but it seems quite promising. - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
Re: Motivational Systems of an AI [WAS Re: [agi] RSI - What is it and how fast?]
--- Eric Baum [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Matt --- Hank Conn [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 12/1/06, Matt Mahoney [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The goals of humanity, like all other species, was determined by evolution. It is to propagate the species. That's not the goal of humanity. That's the goal of the evolution of humanity, which has been defunct for a while. Matt We have slowed evolution through medical advances, birth control Matt and genetic engineering, but I don't think we have stopped it Matt completely yet. I don't know what reason there is to think we have slowed evolution, rather than speeded it up. I would hazard to guess, for example, that since the discovery of birth control, we have been selecting very rapidly for people who choose to have more babies. In fact, I suspect this is one reason why the US (which became rich before most of the rest of the world) has a higher birth rate than Europe. Yes, but actually most of the population increase in the U.S. is from immigration. Population is growing the fastest in the poorest countries, especially Africa. Likewise, I expect medical advances in childbirth etc are selecting very rapidly for multiple births (which once upon a time often killed off mother and child.) I expect this, rather than or in addition to the effects of fertility drugs, is the reason for the rise in multiple births. The main effect of medical advances is to keep children alive who would otherwise have died from genetic weaknesses, allowing these weaknesses to be propagated. Genetic engineering has not yet had much effect on human evolution, as it has in agriculture. We have the technology to greatly speed up human evolution, but it is suppressed for ethical reasons. -- Matt Mahoney, [EMAIL PROTECTED] - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
Re: [agi] The Singularity
--- John Scanlon [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Alright, I have to say this. I don't believe that the singularity is near, or that it will even occur. I am working very hard at developing real artificial general intelligence, but from what I know, it will not come quickly. It will be slow and incremental. The idea that very soon we can create a system that can understand its own code and start programming itself is ludicrous. Any arguments? Not very soon, maybe 10 or 20 years. General programming skills will first require an adult level language model and intelligence, something that could pass the Turing test. Currently we can write program-writing programs only in very restricted environments with simple, well defined goals (e.g. genetic algorithms). This is not sufficient for recursive self improvement. The AGI will first need to be at the intellectual level of the humans who built it. This means sufficient skills to do research, and to write programs from ambiguous natural language specificiations and have enough world knowledge to figure out what the customer really wanted. -- Matt Mahoney, [EMAIL PROTECTED] - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
Re: Re: [agi] A question on the symbol-system hypothesis
--- Ben Goertzel [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Matt Maohoney wrote: My point is that when AGI is built, you will have to trust its answers based on the correctness of the learning algorithms, and not by examining the internal data or tracing the reasoning. Agreed... I believe this is the fundamental flaw of all AI systems based on structured knowledge representations, such as first order logic, frames, connectionist systems, term logic, rule based systems, and so on. I have a few points in response to this: 1) Just because a system is based on logic (in whatever sense you want to interpret that phrase) doesn't mean its reasoning can in practice be traced by humans. As I noted in recent posts, probabilistic logic systems will regularly draw conclusions based on synthesizing (say) tens of thousands or more weak conclusions into one moderately strong one. Tracing this kind of inference trail in detail is pretty tough for any human, pragmatically speaking... 2) IMO the dichotomy between logic based and statistical AI systems is fairly bogus. The dichotomy serves to separate extremes on either side, but my point is that when a statistical AI system becomes really serious it becomes effectively logic-based, and when a logic-based AI system becomes really serious it becomes effectively statistical ;-) I see your point that there is no sharp boundary between structured knowledge and statistical approaches. What I mean is that the normal software engineering practice of breaking down a hard problem into components with well defined interfaces does not work for AGI. We usually try things like: input text -- parser -- semantic extraction -- inference engine -- output text. The fallacy is believing that the intermediate representation would be more comprehensible than the input or output. That isn't possible because of the huge amount of data. In a toy system you might have 100 facts that you can compress down to a diagram that fits on a sheet of paper. In reality you might have a gigabyte of text that you can compress down to 10^9 bits. Whatever form this takes can't be more comprehensible than the input or output text. I think it is actually liberating to remove the requirement for transparency that was typical of GOFAI. For example, your knowledge representation could still be any of the existing forms but it could also be a huge matrix with billions of elements. But it will require a different approach to build, not so much engineering, but more of an experimental science, where you test different learning algoriths at the inputs and outputs only. -- Matt Mahoney, [EMAIL PROTECTED] - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
Re: [agi] The Singularity
Your message appeared at first to be rambling and incoherent, but I see that that's probably because English is a second language for you. But that's not a problem if your ideas are solid. Yes, there is fake artificial intelligence out there, systems that are proposed to be intelligent but aren't and can't be because they are dead ends. A big example of this is Cyc. And there are others. The Turing test is a bad test for AI. The reasons for this have already been brought up on this mailing list. I could go into the criticisms myself, but there are other people here who have already spoken well on the subject. And yes, language is an essential part of any intelligent system. But there there is another part you haven't mentioned -- the actual intelligence that can understand and manipulate language. Intelligence is not just parsing and logic. It is imagination and visualization that relates words to their referents in the real world. What is your idea of how this imagination and visualization that relates language to phenomena in the real world can be engineered in software in such a way that the singularity will be brought about? Andrii (lOkadin) Zvorygin wrote: On 12/5/06, John Scanlon [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Alright, I have to say this. I don't believe that the singularity is near, or that it will even occur. I am working very hard at developing real artificial general intelligence, but from what I know, it will not come quickly. It will be slow and incremental. The idea that very soon we can create a system that can understand its own code and start programming itself is ludicrous. Any arguments? Have you read Ray Kurzweil? He doesn't just make things up. There are plenty of reasons to believe in the Singularity. Other than disaster theories there really is no negative evidence I've ever come across. real artificial intelligence .u'i(amusement) A little bit of an oxymoron there. It also seems to imply there is fake artificial intelligence.u'e(wonder). Of course if you could define fake artificial intelligence then you define what real artificial intelligence is. Once you define what real artificial intelligence means, or at least what symptoms you would be willing to satisfy for (Turing test). If it's the Turing test you're after as am I, then language is the key(I like stating the obvious please humour me). Once we established the goal -- a discussion between yourself and the computer in the language of choice. We look at the options that we have available: natural languages; artificial languages. Natural languages tend to be pretty ambiguous hard to parse, hard to code for -- you can do it if you are a masochist I don't mind .ui(happiness). Many/Most artificial languages suffer from similar if not the same kind of ambiguity, though because they are created they by definition can only have as many exceptions as were designed in. There is a promising subset of artificial languages: logical languages. Logical languages adhere to some form of logic(usually predicate) and are a relatively new phenomenon(1955 first paper on Loglan. All logical languages I'm aware of are derivatives). Problem with Loglan is that it is proprietary, so that brings us to Lojban. Lojban will probably not be the final solution either as there is still some ambiguity in the lujvo (compound words). A Lojban-Prolog hybrid language is currently being worked on by myself. In predicate logic(as with logical languages) each sentence has a predicate(function .i.e. KLAma). Each predicate takes arguments(SUMti). If you are to type a logical sentence to an inter perter depending on the kind of sentence it can perform different actions. Imperative statement: mu'a(for example) ko FANva zo VALsi meaning: be the translator of word VALsi This isn't really enough information for you or I to give a reply with any certainty as we don't know the language to translate from and the language to translate to, which brings us to. Questions: mu'a .i FANva zo VALsi ma ma meaning: translation of word VALsi into what language from what language? (.e'o(request) make an effort to look at the Lojban, I know it's hard but it's essential for conveying the simplicity with which you can make well articulated unambiguous statements in Lojban that are easy to parse and interpret.) To this question the user could reply: la.ENGlic. la.LOJban. meaning: That which is named ENGlic That which is named LOJban. If the computer has the information about the translation it will return it. If not it will ask the user to fill in the blank by asking another question (mu'a .iFANva fuma) There are almost 1300 root words(GISmu) in Lojban with several hundred CMAvo. For my implementation of the language I will probably remove a large amount of these as they are not necessary(mu'a SOFto which means Soviet) and should really go into name(CMEne) space(mu'a la.SOviet.) The point
Re: [agi] The Singularity
I'm a little bit familiar with Piaget, and I'm guessing that the formal stage of development is something on the level of a four-year-old child. If we could create an AI system with the intelligence of a four-year-old child, then we would have a huge breakthrough, far beyond anything done so far in a computer. And we would be approaching a possible singularity. It's just that I see no evidence anywhere of this kind of breakthrough, or anything close to it. My ideas are certainly inadequate in themselves at the present time. My Gnoljinn project is just about at the point where I can start writing the code for the intelligence engine. The architecture is in place, the interface language, Jinnteera, is being parsed, images are being sent into the Gnoljinn server (along with linguistic statements) and are being pre-processed. The development of the intelligence engine will take time, a lot of coding, experimentation, and re-coding, until I get it right. It's all experimental, and will take time. I see a singularity, if it occurs at all, to be at least a hundred years out. I know you have a much shorter time frame. But what is it about Novamente that will allow it in a few years time to comprehend its own computer code and intelligently re-write it (especially a system as complex as Novamente)? The artificial intelligence problem is much more difficult than most people imagine it to be. Ben Goertzel wrote: John, On 12/5/06, John Scanlon [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I don't believe that the singularity is near, or that it will even occur. I am working very hard at developing real artificial general intelligence, but from what I know, it will not come quickly. It will be slow and incremental. The idea that very soon we can create a system that can understand its own code and start programming itself is ludicrous. First, since my birthday is just a few days off, I'll permit myself an obnoxious reply: grin Ummm... perhaps your skepticism has more to do with the inadequacies of **your own** AGI design than with the limitations of AGI designs in general? /grin Seriously: I agree that progress toward AGI will be incremental, but the question is how long each increment will take. My bet is that progress will seem slow for a while -- and then, all of a sudden, it'll seem shockingly fast. Not necessarily hard takeoff in 5 minutes fast, but at least Wow, this system is getting a lot smarter every single week -- I've lost my urge to go on vacation fast ... leading up to the phase of Suddenly the hard takeoff is a topic for discussion **with the AI system itself** ... According to my understanding of the Novamente design and artificial developmental psychology, the breakthrough from slow to fast incremental progress will occur when the AGI system reaches Piaget's formal stage of development: http://www.agiri.org/wiki/index.php/Formal_Stage At this point, the human child like intuition of the AGI system will be able to synergize with its computer like ability to do formal syntactic analysis, and some really interesting stuff will start to happen (deviating pretty far from our experience with human cognitive development). -- Ben - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303 - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
Re: Re: [agi] The Singularity
I see a singularity, if it occurs at all, to be at least a hundred years out. To use Kurzweil's language, you're not thinking in exponential time ;-) The artificial intelligence problem is much more difficult than most people imagine it to be. Most people have close to zero basis to even think about the topic in a useful way. And most professional, academic or industry AI folks are more pessimistic than you are. But what is it about Novamente that will allow it in a few years time to comprehend its own computer code and intelligently re-write it (especially a system as complex as Novamente)? I'm not going to try to summarize the key ideas underlying Novamente in an email. I have been asked to write a nontechnical overview of the NM approach to AGI for a popular website, and may find time for it later this month... if so, I'll post a link to this list. Obviously, I think I have solved some fundamental issues related to implementing general cognition on contemporary computers. I believe the cognitive mechanisms designed for NM will be adequate to lead to the emergence within the system of the key emergent structures of mind (self, will, focused awareness), and from these key emergent structures comes the capability for ever-increasing intelligence. Specific timing estimates for NM are hard to come by -- especially because of funding vagaries (currently progress is steady but slow for this reason), and because of the general difficulty of estimating the rate of progress of any large-scale software project .. not to mention various research uncertainties. But 100 years is way off. -- Ben - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
Re: [agi] The Singularity
Hank, Do you have a personal understanding/design of AGI and intelligence in general that predicts a soon-to-come singularity? Do you have theories or a design for an AGI? John Hank Conn wrote: It has been my experience that one's expectations on the future of AI/Singularity is directly dependent upon one's understanding/design of AGI and intelligence in general. On 12/5/06, Ben Goertzel [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: John, On 12/5/06, John Scanlon [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I don't believe that the singularity is near, or that it will even occur. I am working very hard at developing real artificial general intelligence, but from what I know, it will not come quickly. It will be slow and incremental. The idea that very soon we can create a system that can understand its own code and start programming itself is ludicrous. First, since my birthday is just a few days off, I'll permit myself an obnoxious reply: grin Ummm... perhaps your skepticism has more to do with the inadequacies of **your own** AGI design than with the limitations of AGI designs in general? /grin Seriously: I agree that progress toward AGI will be incremental, but the question is how long each increment will take. My bet is that progress will seem slow for a while -- and then, all of a sudden, it'll seem shockingly fast. Not necessarily hard takeoff in 5 minutes fast, but at least Wow, this system is getting a lot smarter every single week -- I've lost my urge to go on vacation fast ... leading up to the phase of Suddenly the hard takeoff is a topic for discussion **with the AI system itself** ... According to my understanding of the Novamente design and artificial developmental psychology, the breakthrough from slow to fast incremental progress will occur when the AGI system reaches Piaget's formal stage of development: http://www.agiri.org/wiki/index.php/Formal_Stage At this point, the human child like intuition of the AGI system will be able to synergize with its computer like ability to do formal syntactic analysis, and some really interesting stuff will start to happen (deviating pretty far from our experience with human cognitive development). -- Ben - This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
