Hi Ben,
First of all, thanks for inviting me to this list. It looks really
exciting.
Because this is moonlighting work for me, I typically participate in forums
and post variants of my comments to my HyperAdvance blog
(http://www.hyperadvance.com). Please let me know if this is not o.k. in
this forum.
Before I comment, I need to let everyone on this list know that I'm probably
coming at this from a much different perspective than most of the people
here. I came to be interested in AI from in depth studies of human
creativity, which led me into knowledge study, and then into a more precise
definition knowledge creation that incorporates terms like creativity,
innovation, genius, and problem solving.
That said, please excuse any technical ignorance in my postings. I've
helped implement very complex systems and expert systems, but have never
written any kind of code with that end.
Anyway, to get to this 'friendly AI' topic, I first have to state that I see
AI itself as a misnomer. I define intelligence as knowledge that is stored
and retrievable, be it in/from a brain or a system. Under this definition,
AI would have obviously already occurred. In my opinion, the piece that has
not yet occurred in a comprehensible way is 'artificial knowledge creation.'
In my opinion, which is definitely not the popular view on this, the
realization of artificial knowledge creation is synonymous with Singularity.
Knowledge is a complex, logical structure of symbols, chosen by a society.
Natural language, which is used in our society to 'work' knowledge, is
linear, while the knowledge structure itself is three-dimensional.
Looking at the natural language interface, which is weak to start with
(because it is linear), AI research could easily get sidetracked with how to
make a machine that can recognize and respond to natural language...and miss
the point of advancing the knowledge that is behind the natural language
interface.
Key point being...one can advance knowledge without too much concern for a
natural language interface. And one can leave this entirely, if a new set
of symbols are chosen (for example, a new, three-dimensional langugage).
Artificial knowledge creation (AKC) is a more appropriate term because the
intent then is to artificially advance knowledge (through knowledge
creation). Granted, one intent may be to create a machine that can interact
with humans, but that is simply an exercise in replication of the human
paradigm and not true AI. True AI, or AKC, is the automatic advance of
knowledge in a society to the limits of the artificial storage capacity.
Emotion then, really doesn't enter into this equation. Emotion is a part of
replicating the human paradigm, but does not have to be at all involved in
terms of automating or mechanizing knowledge advance. Knowledge creation
appears to be serendipitous, but in reality it is a cold, hard, logical
process with no feelings in it. It operates by converting questions, which
are a perceived lack of knowledge structure, into knowledge, which is the
logical structure of symbols. This is the process behind all the
'creativity' terms and methods across all disciplines and industries. It is
very predictable and could theoretically be mechanized.
Kind Regards,
Bruce LaDuke
Managing Director
Instant Innovation, LLC
Indianapolis, IN
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.hyperadvance.com
----Original Message Follows----
From: "Ben Goertzel" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [email protected]
Subject: [singularity] Is Friendly AI Bunk?
Date: Sun, 10 Sep 2006 01:42:25 -0400
Hi all!
Over 50 people have subscribed to this new list since its creation a
couple days ago, which is pretty exciting. This seems like a large
enough crew that it's worth launching a discussion.
There are a lot of things I'd like to talk with y'all about on this
list -- in fact, I'd planned to start things off with a discussion of
the possible relevance of quantum theory and John Wheeler's notion of
"It from Bit" to the Singularity. But now I've decided to save that
for just a little later, because my friend Shane Legg posted an
interesting and controversial blog entry
http://www.vetta.org
entitled "Friendly AI is Bunk" which seems to me worthy of discussion.
Shane wrote it after a conversation we (together with my wife
Izabela) had in Genova last week. (As a bit of background, Shane is
no AGI slacker: he is currently a PhD student of Marcus Hutter working
on the theory of near-infinitely-powerful AGI, and in past he worked
with me on the Webmind AI project in the late 1990's, and with Peter
Voss on the A2I2 project.)
Not to be left out, I also wrote down some of my own thoughts
following our interesting chat in that Genova cafe' (which of course
followed up a long series of email chats on similar themes), which you
may find here:
http://www.goertzel.org/papers/LimitationsOnFriendliness.pdf
and which is also linked from (and briefly discussed in, along with a
bunch of other rambling) this recent blog entry of mine:
http://www.goertzel.org/blog/blog.htm
My own take in the above PDF is not as entertainingly written as
Shane's (a bit more technical) nor quite as extreme, but we have the
same basic idea, I think. The main difference between our
perspectives is that, while I agree with Shane that achieving
"Friendly AI" (in the sense of AI that is somehow guaranteed to remain
benevolent to humans even as the world and it evolve and grow) is an
infeasible idea ... I still suspect it may be possible to create AGI's
that are very likely to maintain other, more abstract sorts of
desirable properties (compassion, anyone?) as they evolve and grow.
This latter notion is extremely interesting to me and I wish I had
time to focus on developing it further ... I'm sure though that I will
take that time, in time ;-)
Thoughtful comments on Shane's or my yakking, linked above, will be
much appreciated and enjoyed.... (All points of view will be accepted
openly, of course: although I am hosting this new list, my goal is not
to have a list of discussions mirroring my own view, but rather to
have a list I can learn something from.)
Yours,
Ben Goertzel
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