> The field is now called AGI.
No it's not.
No it's not.
Many of those links in grandparent post were from or about opencog. I can make long blog posts about opencog that refer to opencog as proof, too...but it wouldn't mean anything. Religious people do that sort of thing all the time.
The proof would be in the pudding, right? So if AGI at least has some hypothesis, then it should be able to produce some results, right?
I very much want AGI to happen. You want AGI to happen. Our interests are in agreement. However, there isn't really much proof about any current hypothesis, as far as I can tell, that can produce any real system. It's a dream so far.
I don't mean it has to be a really solid understanding of conscience but it's so undefined, unknown area right now we can't even approach it.
Instead of making long blog posts and replies to comments, and then get offended when people don't buy into it, the most people can do right now is to go investigate, hypothesize and try to build something.
AGI is one of those little goofy microtrends: so far as I can tell it's essentially a rebranding of Strong AI by soft computing reactionaries responding to AI getting dominated by domain specificity (otherwise known as "being successful"). To claim, as the grandparent appears to be doing, that AI is now properly called Artificial General Intelligence, is crackpottery at its finest.
Wake me up when AGI even appears on the first results page of a Google search for "AGI".
Did you really look into AGI, for example the past conferences or those projects, and conclude that it is just invaluable holistic mumbo-jumbo?
That is so unfair and inaccurate, I can't see how you can possibly be evaluating things rationally if you really came to that conclusion.
I think it's fundamentally the difference between soft bullshit and hard calculations. Everyone can talk about AI, or linguistics, or statistics (or any complex field) in very general, undefined and bullshitty terms.
But what we need, and what the machine learning guys are bringing is hard calculation - 1 + 1 = 2 or input data, get features and make decisions well above human abilities.
My question to all the fringe folks: Where's the beef? What have they done? Where are the automatic cars built on Chomsky's theories? Where are the talking robots from the AGI? What methods have the SENS people got? Are the singularity folks just leeches off gullible rich people - selling them a future and taking their cash in the process without providing any real value?
Chomsky's a pretty substantial walker.
> Every time I fire a linguist, the performance of the speech recognizer goes up.
-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Jelinek
I still don't see Chomsky robots walking around, Chomsky translation translating my text to French or Chomsky AI driving cars. Nope - all Google/IBM/Microsoft/DARPA/Boston Dynamics/etc. AKA Hard science-engineers utilising statistics, not soft science blowhards.
Only thing I see Chomsky doing is talk - a lot.
Mathematicians aren't - you can prove their correctness over abstract planes and use them to for example run a hedge fund or a software company into trillions of revenue when making testable predictions in macro reality.
Theoretical physicists that use mathematics to make testable predictions are too. You can use them to also make electric engines, statistical extractors and accurate physical simulations that are corroborated with empirical evidence.
If the prediction is not testable, is unfalsifiable, is unreproducible, is not independent and is not supported by overwhelming evidence - it is bullshit - no ifs, buts or ands.
It can only be 'proved' in the 'contrived' world of pure mathematics... what bullshit!
The idea being, that you'd have to back pedal, and change your qualification. Which I could then use to apply to other fields, that you deem as 'quackery', and thus undo the foundation of your argument.
Instead, you just denied the reality of what you said... I didn't count on that. Well done.
The model probably doesn't have a great deal of relation to what happens inside folks heads - but it was stupidly useful for making computers do stuff though. Might be better techniques now - I don't know. But saying that it wasn't applicable practical work is basically ignoring the NLP stuff that was happening in the 80's and 90's.
(let alone the more obvious useful stuff for us geeky folk - the formal grammar stuff we use and think about for compilers. Chomsky Hierarchy, etc.)
And, I'm not enough of a historian of science to know, but it seems to me that the basic results Chomsky proved on Regular Languages and CFGs paved the way for the Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) that have been so effective in language understanding. Basically, the HMMs are the natural probabilistic extension of Regular Languages.
I'm not sure if Viterbi and the other developers of the basic HMM toolkit were directly influenced by Chomsky, or if state machines were just in the air. Certainly Chomsky's basic work in the late 1950s predated Viterbi's work in the 1960s.
Anyway, you have to at least include AGI if you are serious about human-like AIs.
I think part of the problem is that we don't even know what AGI really is. How do you define conscience in a rigourous way. Doesn't mean it can't be done without such work but it just seems soooo undefined right now that people are suspicious if someone comes along and claims to have a partial solution.
Do we even know what we're looking for? When we do know or have an idea, I am willing to imagine that we'd have more AI research in that area and the AGI would be taken more seriously.