Re: Introducing myself

From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Mon Apr 01 2002 - 19:50:12 MST


Ben Goertzel wrote:
>
> Eliezer, I don't see how lack of funding is an intrinsic obstacle to
> starting programming!
>
> It is an obstacle to hiring programmers for pay, but not to recruiting
> volunteers to program in their spare time.
>
> I have *no* funding for the "Real AI" aspects of my own AI projects, and
> only very very scant funding for the commercial-product-oriented aspects,
> but this is not stopping me from recruiting volunteers....

As I understand it, the core people working on Novamente are people who
worked together for an extended period on Webmind and hence are already
trained to work together on the task at hand. With that core group of
full-time experienced people, it becomes possible to coordinate volunteers,
although I don't know if you have any non-Webmind volunteers at this
point(?). Would you have wanted to *start out* work on Webmind with a few
volunteers? Do you think it would have gotten anywhere? Maybe it would,
since Webmind had a much-less-tight architecture (I expect), but would it
have worked for starting out on building Novamente if you hadn't already
built Webmind?

Starting on real AI takes programmers working together in the same physical
location, full time, and extended orientation sessions that would suck up
tremendous time if I had to repeat them independently for each recruit.
This is not a Ping-Pong game we are setting out to program. The core group
*must* be full time, we probably need to be working in physically the same
location. And it would be best if the initial design session, where we all
decided what we were building, incorporated all of the starting team - the
best way to understand some plans is to be there when they were created.

-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://intelligence.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence



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