Re: Something more interesting, please!

Curt Welch wrote:

[materialism]

This is the whole complexity of the topic
and why you see it debated ad nauseam here (and elsewhere in philosophy).

I understand that some people are not materialists, and think
there's a soul - or some other metaphysical mystery - at the
root of minds.

But AI scientists need pay these folk no more attention than
the evolutionists pay creationists.

Debating creationists is mostly a useless time sink.

Similarly AI practitioners can mostly ignore the anti-materialist
naysayers, and get on with their real work. Hofstadter, Dennett,
etc. put the case for materialism in AI long ago.

It's not as though the anti-materialists are in charge of funding,
and really need a rude awakening.

How about some posts on something interesting:

e.g. will the first AI arise out of a proofreading project, a customer
service shop, a search assistant, a robot project, a NPC in a
game, out of something to do with pornography, or in some other way?

I vote for a government funded robotics project for the military.

Woo, scary ;-)

or: we have a whole WWW of textual training data - how best to use
that to make an AI that does more than proofreading?

You can't understand English to the level needed if you can't ground the
meaning of the ontology to our existence in 3D space/time. Words,
pictures, and videos from the Internet are not enough for an AI to
understand what it all means to the level needed to do constructive
proofreading.

IMO, you could build an /extremely/ useful proofreader from all
that data. ***-loads better than today's spell checkers, anyway.
But proofreading is a rather narrow AI task - you couldn't
hold much of a conversation with such a beast.

AI can produce better spell checkers and
grammar checkers, but it runs out of steam when it can't understand the
content of anything it's reading because it has no grounding. The
information it needs to understand all the text on the internet is not
actually on the internet, it only exists in the heads of the humans who
built the internet.

The only way to get that grounding is to build a learning machine and give
it sensors and effectors connected to the real world (eyes and ears, arms
and legs).

I'm not expecting to build a mind that lives in the real world
directly - that would take far too long, and looks like an
impractical approach to me.

IMO, the immediate aim should be to build a mind that lives in cyberspace. Such a virtual robot should be able to sense and act -
but not with eyes and arms, but rather with I/O ASCII streams.

Cyberspace is a real and important environment, and I *definitely*
think that the first decent AIs will spend most of their time in it.

It's true that many cyberspace tokens have associated real-world
concepts, that it would be /nice/ to understand in the context
of some applications - but I don't think building robots is
a good answer to this in the short term - since it would be too time-consuming a diversion. Rather such AIs should figure
out as much as they can from the context, and do the best
they can. If there's some important concept that they
know that they don't understand, they can try asking.

Of course AIs will /eventually/ acquire sensors and
actuators that extend beyond cyberspace - but they /probably/
don't need to do much of that in order to reach the point
where they can collectively redesign, reprogram and
improve themselves - and that seems like the main thing
to aim at. Once we have self-improving AI, it ought to
be able to help a great deal with nailing down molecular
nanotechnology - and /then/ we will be able to build some
proper robots.
--
__________
|im |yler http://timtyler.org/ tim@xxxxxxxxxxx Remove lock to reply.
.