From: Ben Goertzel (ben@goertzel.org)
Date: Wed May 15 2002 - 06:38:25 MDT
IBM is very much into Moore's Law and they run their R&D side with this in
mind. They have done their own charting of the future, which parallels and
perhaps exceeds Kurzweil's in both detail and optimism. But the people who
lead their R&D are absolutely not "AI true believers".
M$ would seem to be in the same boat. Bill Gates is a fan of "global brain"
type thinking and of limited AI paradigms such as bayesian nets, but not of
AI on the grand scale.
Basically, no one in a research leadership position in contemporary American
business seems to be terribly optimistic as regards the potential imminence
of real AI and the potential of Moore's Law (and related growth curves) to
help enable this.
They have been burned too many times by the "AI is just around the corner"
story, so that even though they're doing R&D aimed 10 years out, they're
still not including AGI in the picture
Of course this could change next year.... I'm guessing that it will not
change until one of the current crop of fringy AI projects has some kind of
widely publicized success, but perhaps this is pessimistic and change will
come due to the politicking of AGI advocates within these organizations, who
do exist.
Ben G
> Mike Deering: I agree with your enthusiastic assessment that
> "Underground AI
> is
> BIG BIG BIG!", but I very much doubt that corporations like IBM$
> and M$ are
> developing anything other than GOFAI. These are incredibly conservative
> organizations, who would see zero benefit (more precisely, zero profit) in
> creating a self-improving AI. I strongly suspect that the groups
> making the
> IBM$ and M$ R&D decisions are sufficiently smart and
> well-informed enough to
> realise that the very first real self-improving AI that has a
> hard (or even
> a
> soft) take off, will cause their corporate reason-for-existence
> to evaporate
> like spilled ether.
>
> As for Deep Blue being a parlour trick... not exactly... it was designed,
> conceived and executed with one purpose in mind: to improve IBM's image in
> order to create more profit. (And, by the way, it worked!)
>
> One last thing, Mike Deering: your short stories Kick Butt! B^D
>
> Michael Roy Ames
>
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