ImmInst.org Forums: Viability of AGI for Life Extension & Singularity - ImmInst.org Forums

BruceKlein said:

That's pretty harsh for me to take...what if the machines consider me to have a pretty "low" level of intelligence? What will I have to do to upgrade? Does it require part of my brain to be a machine?

Would data be "Downloadable" or something to the point where my "intelligence" would be a factor of how much data I've downloaded? What you are saying, if I am hearing it correctly, is that you are producing a real "nootropic" effect, without a pill. Maybe nootropic is the wrong term..

John Schloendorn said:

I've referenced The Animatrix before (check these short animes out if you have not seen them)...your body, in one possible scenario, could be the energy source for the machines...if we humans do it "wrong."

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When you were born, your parents probably felt the same way about you, no? They saw potential enough to care for you. If we get the code right, we will create an AGI with a similar innate propensity to care for us.

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It will be a mix... genetics then nanotech, etc... if you want to be early, start saving, it'll be expensive.

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You are already a biological robot and your mind is encapsulated inside an articulated machine.

We like being human because we are used to it. This comfort is superficial, for we spend virtually our entire lives evading knowledge of our inner workings... Perhaps what people are really afraid of is being in a hard-skinned, cold-bodied machine with little in the way of senses and sensuality to stimulate the mind within. But what if the cyberbody was a warm, energized, super-sensual morphing device of graceful complexity and beauty, inside and out? In this regard, the human form will probably come to be seen for the articulated clunker that it really is. [Pg 345 "Beyond Humanity"]

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In general, yes, but the key to intelligence is not how much data, but how optimally one uses the data.

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Correct.

It's unfortunate that the military is one of the primary advocates of artificial intelligence, because the military hasn't been very intelligent, or at least it hasn't been very wise. Artificial intelligence should be developed so that it can neutralize any threats, but not become a threat itself. That should be the sole function of the military too, but unfortunately, judging by human history, the highest degree of military wisdom seems to echo the X-man Wolverine's philosophy: "The best defense is a good offense," which is actually kinda stoopid. AGI will be subject to our own human intentions, especially at first, and I just hope human will becomes radically more benevolent itself. I have some doubts that the singularity will be accomplished within a few years by a small band of lowly funded programmers. They might be unrealistically optimistic. Human intelligence is extraordinarily complex. How far along is it? Can it recognize simple objects? Sure it would be able to recognize and pick up a virtual bunny, but if it saw a video of a real bunny, would it be able to recognize that it's a bunny? It would have to be programmed to recognize many different shapes and forms, many different nuances of language, and many different nuances of action before it comes one wit close to full human intelligence. The singularity could be lifetimes away. I get the feeling that unrealistic optimism abounds, but I'm still interested and intrigued because I know that a speck of real hope lays at the bottom of Pandora's box. How truly advanced is this Novamente project?

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We are about 40% along... as mentioned earlier, we estimate it will take 6 years w/ a full-time staff (about a dozen programmers) to reach human-level AI.

It's worth mentioning that many individuals on the Novamente team have been working together on AGI for some time. WebMind, an AGI company founded by Ben Goertzel in 1998, at one point had more than 150 employees working to create a thinking machine. A casualty of the dotcom crash, WebMind went bankrupt in 2001. Ben writes about this in Waking Up from the Economy of Dreams -or- The Intricate and Peculiar Torture of Taking One’s Tech Company Bankrupt.

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To be clear, NovaBaby can "recognize" tasks and then strive to complete them. Each time it tries to complete a task, it can "recognizes" more successful ways to do so.

So, to answer your question more directly, our task for NovaBaby is to pick out a specified object within a group objects or landscape… then scale up the difficulty as NovaBaby grows in intelligence.

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Rather than create a program with millions of hard rules to recogonize shapes, etc... Novamente uses what is called Self-Modifying Evolving Probabilistic Hypergraphs (SMEPH) to learn what a shape is, etc...

Here is one aspect of the idea which highlights the probabilistic part:



This is a Natural Language Processing example, eventhough you see how each item is given by the system a probability (.6, .95) rather than made a hard rule... so imagine this approach multiplied millions of times over many different things... names, shapes, abstract concepts, etc... and you start to get a feel for how the Novamente system relies on probability rather than hard rule.

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Because I see us as having the leading AGI design, I estimate Novamente to be at least a few years ahead of other AGI system-building projects.

Here is the Novamente Project Plan. Sorry it is hard to read, but this is purposively made so. There are 70 tasks which are needed to be completed in a specific order for us to meet the 6 year target to human-level AI.

Ben Goertzel said:

This is a good point. Being the first to develop such an advanced technology that does not have a way to profit off of its development during its development is going to cause problems for many investors with little patience.

You would need also investors with true appreciation and understanding of the many innovations brought to us by the advance of the computer. Jeez, what isn't computerized yet? It's really only a question of time before the type of AI that can be implanted in humans exists.

I would assume the greatest potential for investment for future advanced AI technologies would be engineers who understand the way computers actually work. If I understood enough about the way computers work, and how Novamente works, I would assume my best bet to gather capital would be Intel and AMD's work force; maybe spread Novamente around University engineering departments to interested students?

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The big pitfall there can come from their very understanding. People with advanced study in computer science, as a rule, tend to not have much background in biology or the cognitive sciences. So quite often they wind up with an image of computers as nothing special, and the human brain as something magic. Not all the time, to be sure. But it's a viewpoint I've seen a surprising amount of times.

To highlight the connection between Novamente and biomedical work, Ben Goertzel gave his ImmInst 2005 Conf talk on a number of projects Novamente is working on to advance biomedicine... such as our work to understand the genetics of Parkinson's disease, understand the difference between old and young brains, our work on BioLiterate which is an AI-enhanced biomedical text-mining application the help scientists find relationships (direct and inferred facts, premises for inferred facts and related articles) between chemicals, genes, pathways, proteins and agents.


Ben talking about Novamente & biomedical work at ImmInst's 2005 Conf:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=76...505614870506496


Here's a 2 minute movie of BioLiterate (a Novamente product):
http://www.novamente...literate/movie/

Thanks, Marc!

You may enjoy Hugo de Garis' debate with Penrose here. Hugo has recently joined the Novamente team.

BruceKlein said:

Is there a version of this product available for a trial Bruce?

No trial of BioLiterate... we are currently shopping it to the NIH. However, we'll be happy to demonstrate this to any company with an interest. One can fiddle with a non-working version of the product via our webpage here... which ONLY works in INTERNET EXPLORER currently: http://www.novamente.net/bioliterate (the tables break in FireFox and Opera).

Also, we have a public-web-access version of BioMind's (Novamente's sister company) ArrayGenius OnDemand, which is a product for AI-and ontology-based microarray data analysis. One just needs to register for a password here first.

By the way, when I say "sister company", I mean that many programmers who work at BioMind have also worked with Novamente... and that BioMind relies on Novamente software as used in ArrayGenius... which has been licensed to the NIH's National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for bioinformatics data analysis.

For those who'd like to see an excellent overview of AGI, please see Peter Voss' presentation during Terasem's Nov. 2005 Colloquium on the Law of Transhuman Persons.

It's worth mentioning that while I have great respect for Voss' work, after comparison, I've found Novamente to have a greater depth of programmer talent and, more importantly, the most advanced approach and architecture for creating AGI currently.


http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1...407586383523968

ImmInst's Susan Fonseca-Klein and Sebastian Sethe(Caliban), both presented at this event as well.

Bruce, congratulations on bringing Hugo on board as an advisor! Does Novamente plan to use evolvable hardware in the future, or does it currently?

I have read the Novamente literature you wrote but have yet to read the pdf on hypergraphs. So far my position is very skeptical - how can you guys break down the sub-parts so cleanly, and say for certain each one will take a certain number of months, and at the end of the process you'll have human-level AGI without a doubt? I would tend to think that this sort of extreme certainty would scare away investors. I admire the work you have put into it, though.

I've written a blog post mentioning this thread here. Feel free to comment on it if anything comes to mind.

Great videos you are linking! It's amazing how video-enriched the Internet has become in the last year or two.

Thanks, Michael.

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We are not currently using Prof. de Garis' evolvable hardware but do have plans. FPGA's should provide considerable speed improvements in the evolutionary learning components of Novamente. Implementation would look like this, with Prof. de Garis in purple:

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To be sure, for an explanation of the "6 years" to human-level AI number, please see Ben's reply here.

We are able to segment the project into discreet tasks because we've invested considerable time thus far and have a good understanding of how much more is needed. With that said, there are no guarantees, as Ben replied earlier, it's not 6 months and it's not 25 years either.

By the way, Ben's newest book, which provides the fundamental underpinnings for his work on Novamente, has just been published... coming online to Amazon recently. The book is currently less than $30... comparably less than many of his other more technical works, but a fun book nonetheless.



Ben has also uploaded many of his books, papers and essays to his personal website as well.

BruceKlein said:

I'm trying to catch up slowly with current AI developments. My experience with it is limited to some lisp and prolog programming in the past. So I'm kind of a dinosaur when AI is concerned at the moment.

Anyway, having highlighted my weaknesses with the subject, I also have some strengths. Giving my experience with system integration of various types of information and automation systems, even with current simple and predictable systems, I know verification and validation is a cumbersome process.

I have 2 questions. Forgive me if my approach seems to be sceptical, I consider myself as a “positive scepticist”, but sometimes I find it quite difficult to find a balance using the English language.

1/ How are you planning to verify that AGI self learning algorithms are stable. That they are convergent towards some goal, that might even be not entirely clear in the beginning. I assume that some set of meta level rules on top of the highest layer of logical or functional abstraction are required to apply some form of ethical restrictive.

2/ The practical implication of 1 is: How are you going to validate a set of algorithms or even an integrated system against a predefined set of life scenario’s or challenges for the AGI. Are you able to test the effectiveness of the rules of ethics you implemented, even if you don’t know how your “child” will develop itself.

I assume for both relating issues that it is essential that human enhancement development grows in pace with the AGI development. In order for us to be able to understand what goes on in this machine. “We” must be the machine to get to know its powers, limitations and pitfalls. Or at least we need to have enhanced abilities that are very near to the capabilities of such a machine to be able to judge it’s actions (and thoughts).

Or in the less far future, the humans we are, are just incapable of understanding all implications of self-learning algorithms. Sometimes we even fail to understand our current simple “linear” if-then-else systems. And I know the developers of these systems are no fools either.

BruceKlein said:

Hmm, my way of reasoning in the post above is the complete opposite of this. I assume we need to be on top of AGI developments to be able to judge its validity… [:o]