Followup to: A.I. Old-Timers, Do Scientists Already Know This Stuff?
In response to Robin Hanson’s post on the disillusionment of old-time AI researchers such as Roger Schank, I thought I’d post a few premature words on AI, even though I’m not really ready to do so:
Anyway:
I never expected AI to be easy. I went into the AI field because I thought it was world-crackingly important, and I was willing to work on it if it took the rest of my whole life, even though it looked incredibly difficult.
I’ve noticed that folks who actively work on Artificial General Intelligence, seem to have started out thinking the problem was much easier than it first appeared to me.
In retrospect, if I had not thought that the AGI problem was worth a hundred and fifty thousand human lives per day – that’s what I thought in the beginning – then I would not have challenged it; I would have run away and hid like a scared rabbit. Everything I now know about how to not panic in the face of difficult problems, I learned from tackling AGI, and later, the superproblem of Friendly AI, because running away wasn’t an option.
Try telling one of these AGI folks about Friendly AI, and they reel back, surprised, and immediately say, "But that would be too difficult!" In short, they have the same run-away reflex as anyone else, but AGI has not activated it. (FAI does.)
Roger Schank is not necessarily in this class, please note. Most of the people currently wandering around in the AGI Dungeon are those too blind to see the warning signs, the skulls on spikes, the flaming pits. But e.g. John McCarthy is a warrior of a different sort; he ventured into the AI Dungeon before it was known to be difficult. I find that in terms of raw formidability, the warriors who first stumbled across the Dungeon, impress me rather more than most of the modern explorers – the first explorers were not self-selected for folly. But alas, their weapons tend to be extremely obsolete.
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