
Why I am working on Artificial General Intelligence - chegra
https://medium.com/career-pathing/5c73c0865969
======
orionblastar
My sister and I are working on a problem like that:
[https://medium.com/p/3fdccaab0956](https://medium.com/p/3fdccaab0956)

I believe the term is Artificial Genuine Intelligence so that it can pass a
Turning test. Not too long ago I made an alpha test in PHP/MYSQL using a
Thesaurus and released the code on Github.

We are working on a specific plan on how to solve this problem. Modeled after
how the human brain should work, verses how the human brain fails to get
genuine intelligence with most people and ends up with general intelligence
instead. It is important to note the difference.

For example we are trying to set up a conscience (ignore my sister's poor
spelling in her medium post)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscience](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscience)
that filters out bad thoughts that may harm someone. We are trying to use
logic, reason, and critical thinking but haven't yet devised any data
structures or algorithms for those yet.

We use Artificial Genuine Intelligence from here:
[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/00016918699...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0001691869900213)

Artificial General Intelligence is the sort of AI that won't pass a Turning
test. We use general intelligence and genuine intelligence from neuroscience
and psychology. Most people don't know the difference.

------
bjterry
> It is a technology risk. This means that if I solve it, I wouldn’t have to
> worry about finding customers. VCs like technology risk.

This is wrong (with all due respect to Steve Blank in his video, I don't
really disagree with that video in context). Technology VCs hate technology
risk. Biotech can get funded with 10-15 year lag times because the market risk
is so lopsidedly low with patents, very concrete information on disease
incidence rates, and solid metrics on what likely drug prices can be, among
other factors. Technology VCs would call his AGI a "science project" and
dismiss it. The only reason he can _sort of_ make this statement is that he's
assuming that the technology risk is gone when he says "if I solve it," but
that doesn't mean that they don't hate technology risk. Even if he were
successful in building an AGI there would still be market risk because if he
can get it done, what's the probability that Google or IBM won't have beaten
him to the punch (a VC might say)?

The reason this is a confusion is because "technology risk" and "market risk"
are not anchored to any particular value, they are relative to the speakers
norms, and so each of these parties is anchoring them differently. When Steve
Blank is talking about technology risk, he's not talking about high technology
risk as in building AGI hard, he's talking about "can we build an enterprise
software that automatically handles some highly complex business process that
we aren't QUITE sure is automatable."

------
eli_gottlieb
AGI is a very _weird_ field, in that approximately half the practitioners are
getting experimental results, half are getting formal mathematical results,
and half are complete crackpots outside their own field of Narrow AI
expertise. These attributes can even appear in _the same person_ , though Ray
Kurzweil and Google are famous for seeming more crackpot-y than many for
essentially claiming that a sufficiently large deep-learning or neural-network
algorithm will at some point develop sapience ;-).

Which is obviously wrong. Everyone knows it will develop sapience _and then
develop a fetish for small office implements and destroy humanity._

Ok, to be serious, the guys who are actually doing Real Research into this
sort of thing are, IMHO, Juergen Schmidhuber and Marcus Hutter. They are
getting formal results in what they call the "new formal science" of
"Universal Artificial Intelligence", and their insights into UAI are then
leading them back to insights into Narrow AI and Machine Learning. Notice how
they keep producing publications in reputable journals, keep getting awards
for their papers, and keep getting major research grants? That's called
_results_ , and it's what shows they're onto something.

They actually wrote a textbook on the subject, but it is, unfortunately, well
beyond my level of background knowledge right now. I would recommend it,
however, to anyone who thinks that AGI is going to be as cheap and easy as
throwing lots and lots of machines into a single gigantic machine-learning
cluster.

On the upside, their algorithms can play a game of Pac-Man. Someone ought to
enter them in a Procedural Super Mario competition. But overall, the old dream
of "Strong AI" is not a matter of just coming up with the One True Algorithm
and crossing the finishing line to victory. Even for the researchers smart
enough to see the eventual shape of the finished product, there are lots of
intermediate steps still to be solved -- even though we now have a better idea
of what they are than before.

~~~
orionblastar
Thank you eli_gottlieb, do you have a link to where to buy their book and a
link to their website?

My AGI project is stalled and this level of AI is beyond my understanding
right now, and I have to find a better source to read. I've been using an old
AI book from Radio Shack that my father-in-law gave me just before he died in
2002.

I think it was designed for the Tandy 1000 series and BASIC or Prolog that he
used to have but I have been trying to convert it to different programming
languages. The problem is my wife cleaned up my stuff and I cannot find it
anymore. I think this was it: [http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Artificial-
Intelligence-...](http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Artificial-Intelligence-
Radio-Shack/dp/B000IXKVC6) but I am not 100% sure so I have been guessing.

I got sick and became disabled in 2002, and then my father-in-law died of
cancer while I was in a hospital almost dying myself. I wanted to finish the
AI project he wanted me to do for him, but I've been sick and in way over my
head.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
My disclaimer is: I am NOT an AI researcher. I don't have the mathematical
background _yet_.

As to Schmidhuber and Hutter, Google them. This is their book:
[http://www.amazon.com/Universal-Artificial-Intelligence-
Algo...](http://www.amazon.com/Universal-Artificial-Intelligence-Algorithmic-
Probability/dp/3642060528/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1380727984&sr=8-2)

If you can't understand the math in that book, then you are basically not
going to do better at the Formal UAI field than the crackpots have done for
decades. I mean no disrespect, but nobody has actually discovered an _easier
to understand_ theory of UAI that gets equivalently good results.

A book from 1986 is definitely obsolete, and definitely applies to Narrow AI
rather than AGI. The General/Universal AI field in its modern form dates to
roughly the early-mid 2000s (2003ish is when AIXI was published in the
_Journal of Machine Learning_ and they got their own conference in 2005...
which was kinda crackpotish).

On the other hand, to be encouraging rather than discouraging, one of the
things about the AI/Machine Learning field is that you can discover far less
than "ahaha, talking robots now!" and still have a useful discovery. A*
Heuristic Search was a useful discovery that powers a _huge_ fraction of
modern video-game AI, even though it will never take over the world.

For instance, I read a blog post yesterday about writing improved "rock paper
scissors" bots and came up with a nice little model of strategic "I know you
know I know" Sicilian Reasoning that I scrawled out into a Reddit post.

------
yankoff
Have you developed a specific plan to tackle this problem? ;)

------
cwbrandsma
For how many generations have we said that Artificial General Intelligence
will be "solved in our lifetime". Seems like it is alway a couple of decades
away.

But, if the definition is narrowed, there might be parts of the field that can
be solved.

~~~
ggchappell
> For how many generations have we said that Artificial General Intelligence
> will be "solved in our lifetime".

Ah, but it isn't the same "we".

60 years ago, I guess your basic computing researcher thought human-level AI
was just around the corner. And why not? Suddenly there was this wonderful
machine that could do amazing feats of reasoning and computation in an
eyeblink. And computers were constantly being improved; who knew what they
would be capable of in a few more years.

Nowadays, it's mainly Ray Kurzweil and a few others like him. And ... well,
they're basically _paid_ to say it. I could get a group of 1000 people
together and give them a speech about how 2040 will be much like today, except
for cooler phones, more expensive gas, and faster pizza delivery, and they'll
all be bored and go home disappointed. Get Ray K. in front of the same group
telling them the future is going to be _indescribably_ _different_ , and
they're interested. Some people do write-ups on the speech. It gets discussed.
It's something you hear about. And Ray K. is the one who gets invitations to
other speaking engagements.

In short, when you hear that super-AI is on the horizon, remember that,
however far-fetched that might be, this is an _interesting_ thought. The idea
that it's a long way off, is not nearly so catchy. (See also memes, etc.)

~~~
orionblastar
It is a matter of building data structures and algorithms to teach a computer
the meaning of words, and then use logic of how those words fit together along
with parts of speech. Then make ones for logic, reason, critical thinking, and
then a conscience to screen out any bad 'thoughts' (Yes you have to make a
data structure for thoughts and algorithms for them as well and then a
conscience function to determine if they are good or evil, like 'slice loaf of
bread' is good 'slice finger off person' is evil.)

All I've been able to do is use a Thesaurus to paraphrase words at random.
This Artificial genuine Intelligence will need a Thesaurus database to keep
track of words and words that are like them for fuzzy logic comparisons.
[https://github.com/orionblastar/blastarparaphrase](https://github.com/orionblastar/blastarparaphrase)

My PHP/MYSQL code is just an alpha test proof of concept and I need help with
it as it just does random replacements.

Someone I know has made some AI chatbots with Ruby and Python etc over here:
[http://subbot.org/](http://subbot.org/)

They too need work, but the source code is open and you can look at it and
contact the developer.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
_It is a matter of building data structures and algorithms to teach a computer
the meaning of words, and then use logic of how those words fit together along
with parts of speech. Then make ones for logic, reason, critical thinking, and
then a conscience to screen out any bad 'thoughts' (Yes you have to make a
data structure for thoughts and algorithms for them as well and then a
conscience function to determine if they are good or evil, like 'slice loaf of
bread' is good 'slice finger off person' is evil.)_

This describes something an AGI would be able to do. This is nowhere near an
accurate definition of an AGI.

I'm about to write a top-level comment on this subject pointing to the actual
current science on the subject, so go read ;-).

