From: J. Andrew Rogers (andrew@ceruleansystems.com)
Date: Sat Apr 10 2004 - 10:41:41 MDT
On Apr 10, 2004, at 4:17 AM, Ben Goertzel wrote:
> Russia is full of great engineers and mad scientists. They lack
> supreme
> hardware firepower, but there's money in Russia to build big clusters
> of
> commodity PC's, for sure.
Absolutely. Russia was on my short list of likely contenders.
IMO, the countries with the clearly top notch engineering cultures
required to pull this type of thing off are: Germany, Japan, USA,
Russia, UK, and perhaps Scandinavia.
Other possibles are countries like Australia/New Zealand and Israel
which are capable but suffer from relatively small populations,
lowering the probabilities that it will come from there.
That isn't to say that AI couldn't happen elsewhere, but it would be
very hard to acquire the talent in one place to have a fair chance to
pull it off. One of the things that makes Silicon Valley what it is,
is that there is a seemingly bottomless pool of highly competent and
specialized science/engineering talent here. I have had the problem of
being in other parts of even the US, and not being able to find a
person with the required engineering skills to do a job. This kind of
availability will invariably impact any major AGI project, as
implementation will be a multi-disciplinary effort and requiring many
things to be very well designed.
Regardless of the country of origin of whoever develops the theory, I
expect the implementation to actually occur in one of the major
countries listed above as a practical matter. Theory and abstract
design does not require a significant engineering footprint and could
be done almost anywhere, at least in theory.
j. andrew rogers
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