Aaron Saenz on Artificial General Intelligence
I was just reading about the new AGI company Vicarious on Singularity Hub, and enjoyed this paragraph by Aaron Saenz:
Artificial General Intelligence is one of the Holy Grails of science because it is almost mythical in its promise: not a system that simply learns, but one that reaches and exceeds our own kind of intelligence. A truly new form of advanced life. There are many brilliant people trying to find it. Each of these AI researchers have their own approach, their own expectations, and their own history of failures and a precious few successes. The products you see on the market today are narrow AI – machines that have a very limited ability to learn. As Scott Brown said, “today’s AI technology is so primitive that much of the cleverness goes towards inventing business models that don’t require good algorithms to succeed.†We are in the infantile stages of AGI. If that. Maybe the fetal stages.
I'm not an AGI researcher, but I do hang out with them and talk AGI. Out of everyone I've seen out there so far, the way I think about AGI would be most similar to Josh Tenenbaum. A simple overview of his approach is here.
February 3rd, 2011 - 22:06
Has it been explained somewhere:
What are the limits of self-improvement?
What happens when the code has become the tightest possible assembler and can’t be optimized further significantly, like compression algorithms, which may happen relatively quickly?
Add hardware.
What happens when adding more parallel processing units no longer helps you due to the inherent limit and because of non-parallelizable problems?
Increase hardware clock speed.
What happens when that becomes impossible?
Then there’s computational intractability.
Where are we then? Well past the Singularity or not very far from where we are now?
February 4th, 2011 - 12:51
Seems to me a lot of approaches are converging – see Monica Anderson’s point here:
http://www.quora.com/Who-is-closest-to-developing-true-AI
about her approach and Numenta’s being increasingly similar. Obviously, Vicarious’s approach will have much in common with Numenta’s, even if they are going to differ on the level of mathematical abstraction they are going to use.
Even Tenenbaum’s work seems similar, in that it’s hierarchical.
By the way, this workshop should be good:
http://mit150.mit.edu/symposia/brains-minds-machines
February 6th, 2011 - 11:25
Too bad Monica Anderson finds the Singularity impossible!
February 7th, 2011 - 09:10
What’s that have to do with anything? And I don’t think she meant that, only that future computers won’t be infallible.
What a horrible criteria to use for evaluating someone’s ideas – “they don’t have this belief that I do, therefore all their academic arguments must be wrong.” It is the same logic that prevents people from taking religious debates seriously, and it is very flawed.