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I've made an "all in" bet that AGI is going to be attained by the "human memome project" long before Kurzweil's biomimetic boondoggle achieves anything -- the b

by terra_t 16y ago

I've made an "all in" bet that AGI is going to be attained by the "human memome project" long before Kurzweil's biomimetic boondoggle achieves anything -- the biomimetic boondoggle is appealing to many, however, because the whole society is accustomed to flushing hundreds of billions a year down the drain on biomedical technology without any accountability.

arethuza 16y ago
"human memome project" - do you mean top down symbolic AI projects like CYC?
- terra_t 16y ago
  CYC is an important development in that direction, but a modern memomic approach doesn't privilege top-down over bottom-up approaches. Like the human genome, the human memome is already available (in natural language) and the challenge is interpreting it. I don't believe the state of the art is good enough to create an upper ontology that can capture human experience, but sectors of ontology that capture chunks of it can be built from the bottom up now and merged as necessary. Think of it this way. I know something about quantum physics and I know something about french lit crit. I don't need a general theory that encompasses both of them until I actually need that general theory -- at that point I'm going to build out as much of that theory as I need by an appeal to thought, experience and experiment. The immediate term strategy is to find areas in which "unreasonably effective" strategies make it possible to extract facts and partially solve the "grounding problem". It's important to recognize that this is essentially a finite task: like the Earth's atmosphere, the Earth's noosphere has no perfectly defined 'edge'... However, there's a principle of interconnection and attraction of concepts that causes it to form a 'main body' that is essentially finite. The game of 20 questions shows that, more or less, the scale of human shared reality is 10^6 or so terms.

by terra_t 16y ago

arethuza 16y ago

"human memome project" - do you mean top down symbolic AI projects like CYC?

terra_t 16y ago
CYC is an important development in that direction, but a modern memomic approach doesn't privilege top-down over bottom-up approaches. Like the human genome, the human memome is already available (in natural language) and the challenge is interpreting it. I don't believe the state of the art is good enough to create an upper ontology that can capture human experience, but sectors of ontology that capture chunks of it can be built from the bottom up now and merged as necessary. Think of it this way. I know something about quantum physics and I know something about french lit crit. I don't need a general theory that encompasses both of them until I actually need that general theory -- at that point I'm going to build out as much of that theory as I need by an appeal to thought, experience and experiment. The immediate term strategy is to find areas in which "unreasonably effective" strategies make it possible to extract facts and partially solve the "grounding problem". It's important to recognize that this is essentially a finite task: like the Earth's atmosphere, the Earth's noosphere has no perfectly defined 'edge'... However, there's a principle of interconnection and attraction of concepts that causes it to form a 'main body' that is essentially finite. The game of 20 questions shows that, more or less, the scale of human shared reality is 10^6 or so terms.