From: Ben Goertzel (ben@goertzel.org)
Date: Tue May 21 2002 - 18:03:13 MDT
> For example, Darpa and other government funding agencies are seeking ways
> to improve our intelligence: the Information Awareness project will sort
> through massive data and identify those nuggets of information which,
> when known, could forestall an adversary's attack.
But in their handling of these project, the gov't repeatedly demonstrates
its counterproductive overconservatism.
The BAA for Information Awareness repeatedly stressed how they want to fund
really innovative, out-there stuff -- e.g. completely novel and
unprecedented ways of representing diverse data.
Are they going to fund anything 1/4 as novel and unprecedented as, say,
Novamente? Naw. I'd bet the house against it.
Even when they have the rhetoric of progress and innovation, they will just
keep funding the same old stuff over and over again.... The same old
fundees simply change the rhetoric they use in their proposals.
Thus, all real progress will take place outside of the context of gov't
grant funding, in my view.
The exception could be an organization that took gov't grant funding for
doing something fairly narrow and conventional, and then used some of the
funding to push ahead in innovative directions behind the scenes. I can see
that Cyc has been trying to do this, but I can't see that they've really
been succeeding, so far.
-- Ben G
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