om In this article I will quote and address some of the issues raised against my previous posting. I will then continue with the planned discussion of the current state of AI, I will also survey some of the choices available to the singularitarian community with regards these developments. Specifically, I will outline a manhattan project style AI development effort to reflect the urgency I feel is warranted by the situation.
om Tom says: """"" This is a *very* strong claim, considering how complex intelligence is and how much had yet to be fully understood. """"" The human genome project has found that human DNA only contains around 30,000 genes. While it is true that there are probably an equal number of important regulatory sequences including codes for RNA strands which act directly as enzymes, there remains a fairly strict upper bound on the complexity of the entire human organism. In AI, there are two sources of program complexity. First, there's the general AI algorithm, and second there is the system which the AI must control. I agree that I omitted a treatment of the input and output modalities. I did so because they are negligable in this context. Yes, the brain does an a great deal of sensory pre-processing, and indeed this is very important to it's performance, however, each modality operates in strictly constant time, each "frame" of information is processed with a predictably low latency. The total complexity involved is strictly related to the bandwidth of the information channel. Therefore it cancels out and the only interesting variable which remains is the AI kernel. =) Quoth tom: """""""" The "tabula rasa" hypothesis has been debunked every which way from Sunday. See http://207.210.67.162/~striz/docs/tooby-1992-pfc.pdf. """""""" Well, it seems that you responded before you finished reading the sentence. The next part was "for the most part". While I agree that there are several aspects of the human psyche that are clearly based upon genetically transmitted evolutionary adaptations, these adaptations have been localized through anatomical studies to unique, highly specialized regions of neural tissue such as the hypothalamus and the amygdala. However, when we look at the primary neural pathways including the thalamus, hypocampus, and the basal ganglia (not to mention the cortex), we find a highly regular anatomical structure. We can safely assume these structures do not carry specific information regarding genetic adaptations and is, for all practical purposes a very close approximation to the tabula rasa. The closest thing we can find to an exception to this claim is the visual cortex which is fairly specialized for processing visual information. -- It has additional layers not found in other cortical regions. Even these specializations do not appear to contain any genetic programming. Tom: """"""""" Our brains are *much* more complex than a simple concept-abstraction-and-pattern-recognition device. Such a device, for instance, would be unable to add two and two, or create a whole new category of objects it has never seen. """"""""" ;) Wherever did you get the impression that imagination and human-style mathematics is distinct from concept abstraction and pattern recognition? I could go on for days explaining the evidence supporting this idea as well as an explanation of how perception and imagination are actually the same thing but I don't have nearly enough time to do that now and it would make this post much longer than anyone is willing to read. -- I will if I have to though! =\ tom, once more: """""""" This assumes that the pattern-matcher saturates with repetition of stuff it has seen before. But the universe contains *much more* information than any human could possibly pattern-match- it's simply so darn big. """""""" two responses: 1. Not if you break it down first, it doesn't. ;) 2. How about just the information contained in your neighborhood and accessible to human style senses? Are you going to claim that is too much for your computer even using a relatively poor encoding scheme? Tom: """""""""" Every possible strong AI architecture may be *capable* of absorbing new information and matching it to old patterns, but that does not mean that that is *all* it does. """"""""""" Yes, that is all it does. All AIs will be, at their core, pattern matching machines. Every one of them. You can then procede to tack on any other function which you believe will improve the AI's performance but in every case you will be able to strip it down to pretty much a bare pattern matching system and still obtain a truly formidable intelligence! Matt inscribed: """"""""""" When can we expect a demo? """"""""""" Six months after I somehow obtain 10 megabucks. =\ Matt: """""""""" People with autism lack the ability to recognize faces, which leads to delayed language and social development during childhood. However they do not lack symbolic thought. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autism """""""""" Okay, I'll respond to that after you re-read the part you quoted about the autistic people in question being "high functioning". Those people merely have an impaired ability to conceptualized. I was referring to cases of profound autism. In the cases you refer to, the impairment of symbolic thought is evidenced in the reduced ability to form symbolic concepts for complex things such as "person" or "face". Matt regarding the space complexity of the AI: """""""""" The relationship is a little more complex. I believe it has to do with human brain size, which stops increasing around adolescence. Vocabulary development during childhood is fairly constant at about 5000 words per year. I had looked at the relationship between training set size and information content as part of my original dissertation proposal, which suggests a space complexity more like O(N/log N). http://cs.fit.edu/~mmahoney/dissertation/ """""""""" Okay, there are several noteworthy differences between the conditions you used for your estimation and mine. First, you were looking at the domain of strings of words written by something which we assume to be intelligent. My estimation was based on raw sensory perceptions which covers a domain of colors, lines, shapes, motion, sine waves, tastes, smells, tactile impressions, etc. All of these things are inherently compressible, furthermore, they exist in every perception the universe will ever offer you. The brain is optimized to remove the redundant information as quickly as possible and immediately focus on what is unique about each new perception. Secondly, Symbols != words. The brain processes millions of symbols which are typically too trivial to invent a new word for, or are processed symbolically at a "sub conscious" level which has no direct connection to your faculty of speech. """"""""""" If Turing and Landauer are right, then a PC has enough computational power to pass the Turing test. What we lack is training data, which can only come from the experience of growing up in a human body. """"""""""" Indeed! =) """"""""""" The article does not say if I click on a picture of a dog running across a lawn, whether the system will retrieve pictures of dogs or pictures of brown objects on a green background. """"""""""" True, but does that really matter? The performance of this system may be impaired by it's inability at present to process high-level functions. The question becomes whether it is indeed the case that the underlying approach is of the type which could give rise to general intelligence, or whether it is just an interesting algorithm. The description of the system's performance exactly matches the performance I would expect from a general intelligence algorithm hence I consider the probability that this is indeed a potential general intelligence algorithm to be extremely high. This brings me to the subject of this posting.... (at long last...) om The news items I have been seeing lately strongly suggest that we are rapidly approaching the singularity. The mid-point of the singularity window could be as close as 2009. A rediculously pessimistic prediction would put it around 2012. That would have to assume that some large external event has caused massive social disruption and the people who actually work on these algorithms are utter blockheads who can't see what it can truly do. On the short side, we could literally be hours away from a hard takeoff (yes, I realize it's almost August of 2007). Singularitarians are a strange bunch, they long for a radically altered existence but they, like most, don't do anything visible to really advance that goal or, like kurzweil, make predictions and then push them further into the future as the progress of time brings them too close for comfort. Others are far too preoccupied by the task of creating a cult of personality around themselves to even bother doing anything relevant to the singularity whatsoever. =P Unfortunately, it appears that time has run out. The time for picking our pattern-identical noses is past. The endgame has arrived. To be fair, the risks are not all that great. Despite what you may have been led to believe, the outcome where we do nothing will, in all probability be fairly mild. We will start seeing high-functioning androids. We will see massive layoffs at companies which have converted to AI technologies. We will see a gradual trickle-down of AI based medical advances as the relevant regulatory agencies and other more-or-less mundane technological advances. -- In effect a slow slow takeoff singularity. However, if we go that route (which is the route we are on now!!!), we will loose a number of important things. First we will loose access to the AI's source code. At first it will be a trade secret, and later a state secret. As things ramp up, we can expect AI surveillance of any computer powerful enough to host an AI and will effectively be prohibited from persuing an independent research program. We will loose the financial rewards the inventor of AI is sure to receive. We will loose the ability to press ahead with more radical technologies and transhumanism in general because corporations will not permit any social change which jeapordizes the bottom line and governments will not permit any social change which will cause a 60 year old man to feel uncomfortable. Finally, we will loose time. The older people among us may not have the luxury of another 30 years in order for radically life extending technologies to clear the red tape. Truly, none of us can be so confident that we will not meet an untimely demise in such a span. Because I'm a greedy bastard, I want AI. I want to profit from AI, and I want to use AI for my own devious (-ant?) ends... So what do we do? Clearly my own efforts have been crippled by a whole list of personal failings save for lack of foresight. Right now it looks like we have a workable cortical algorithm and, scattered all over the place, just about every other noteworthy part we'll need for an AI. What we need to do is bring these all together in a system that can manifest intelligence in a clear and human-usable manner. Unfortunately, since I have failed to deliver the operating system I designed to support bringing all of these pieces together, it looks like we will need to do it on conventional systems. Unfortunately conventional systems have extremely poor IPC mechanisms and programs can't be edited while they are running. To get around that we'll have to use an interpreted system which can establish an internal computing environment favorable to rapid prototyping. Squeak ( www.squeak.org ) closely approximates such a system but, sadly, has a number of deficiencies such as poor support for 64 bit platforms (at present) and no support for SMP or multicore systems -- it can't take advantage of additional CPUs in the system.) as I mentioned earlier, the pre-processors for the modalities are fairly straightforward pieces of engineering. Acceptable hardware solutions can be had commercially for no more than $8,000 per modality. This brings us to the question of how we go about training and interracting with the AI. The confused Dr. Goertzel presents a perfectly reasonable case that virtual embodyment makes the most sense because, after the first agent, each additional agent is practically free. All things being equal, this would be a compelling argument. However, Goertzel's own experience with the development of a virtual environment has proven that it is a mamothly complex undertaking which adds so much complexity to the problem as to double or even triple the total development costs. However, if we take a closer look at what we actually need for a robotic platform, and discipline ourselves enough not to immediately jump to the anthropomorphic platforms that are now coming on the market, we can assemble a useful set of cameras, manipulators, and inexpensive mobile platforms for not much more than $50,000. A believe that even such a modest lab will put us in the race to solving AI. I'm willing to attempt that on my own but at my current rate of savings, it would take decades to save up even that much -- even if I eliminated my anime budget. =P If I had more to say, I forgot what it was... where's the send button? om -- Opera: Sing it loud! :o( )>-< ----- 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/?member_id=4007604&id_secret=26671282-37f48e
