RE: Friendliness, Vagueness, self-modifying AGI, etc.

From: Ben Goertzel (ben@goertzel.org)
Date: Wed Apr 07 2004 - 07:12:29 MDT


> I'd be surprised if AGI is developed in less than 30
> years. I'm looking at a 50 year time-frame actually.

Hm.... I had a long argument about this with my girlfriend (who is also
a Novamente programmer/scientist), a couple weeks ago.

She at first argued for a 30-40 year timeframe, whereas I argued for
5-10

She agreed that my estimate was possible if things went reasonably
smoothly with the rest of implementing, testing and teaching Novamente
-- and IF, sometime in the next couple years, enough funding is obtained
for 5-7 of us to spend full-time on nothing but Novamente AGI.

However, her point was that things don't usually go reasonably smoothly,
that there will likely be a long series of errors and corrections, even
if the underlying ideas are correct.

In the end she agreed that 8-10 years was plausible and 15 years was
fairly likely -- assuming the focused team of 5-7 people really has
total focus on the project, and assuming hardware continues to advance
as projected, making the running of multiple simultaneous complex tests
more feasible than it is today. (We have the right 5-7 people, but
they're mostly working on commercial apps of the NM codebase.)

Of course, our conversation assumed that the general Novamente approach
makes sense ;-) ... But the points made also follow if there is some
other sensible approach at a roughly comparable level of development...

I still believe that 5 years from now or even 3 years from now is not
absurd to think about. But we certainly have no chance of getting there
that fast with Novamente, given the current situation of only part-time
attention to the AGI potential of the Novamente software system.

-- Ben G



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