An Open Letter to AGI Investors
Posted on April 16, 2008
Filed Under General |
Sometimes it is difficult for technical people to talk across the gap that separates them from potential investors. Investors need to find out something about a new technology in order to decide whether or not to risk putting money into it, but on the other hand they don’t want to be hit by too much geek-speak. With that in mind, what I am going to do in this short piece is to explain a couple of crucial (and fairly non-technical) points that will let you know why the new “AGI” field is worth getting excited about.
You have heard of ordinary Artificial Intelligence, and you probably already understand that Artificial General Intelligence is a breakaway field that has split from AI. The AGI subfield is about trying to build complete thinking systems, whereas conventional AI stopped trying to do that a long time ago.
I am going to explain just two facts about AGI: why it has the potential to succeed where old AI did not, and why AGI, if it does succeed, is going to be an industry that makes the internet look as technologically cutting-edge as Grandma’s Olde Fashioned Gooseberry Marmalade.
First, then, why will AGI succeed where AI did not? To understand this you have to bear in mind the way that academic scientists and engineers work. To make it big in the academic world you have to publish papers, and what matters in these papers is not the quality of their content, but the sheer quantity of papers you produce. Of course, quality does matter to some extent, but very often “quality” means doing a polished piece of work that fits the mold that everyone has come to expect in your particular area. The worst thing you can do in the modern academic environment is to be brilliant, but publish only one epoch-making book every decade. That one book might count for only one point, whereas someone else who publishes 25 papers a year (be they ever so trashy) will be collecting 25 points a year. Guess who’s going to get the promotion, the research grants, the new job at a prestigious department?
What does this have to do with AI and AGI? Well, AI has always been a very tough frontier field where it is not easy to make noticeable progress, so if you are going to generate those 25 papers a year you had better give up any hope of actually thinking about the core issues that might make a difference. Instead, your best strategy is to solve a few mathematical puzzles, write a little code and then spin the work to make it look like it has something to do with intelligent systems. This is easy once you get the knack, and if you know the trendy issues well enough you can make a pretty good living that way.
The most disastrous strategy, if you are an AI professor in search of grants and a smoothly-greased career path, is to go for the brass ring and try to actually build an intelligent machine - a real, honest-to-goodness thinking computer of the sort that they promised in the early days of AI. Too big. Too risky. No guaranteed 25-papers-a-year payoff.
This has been going on for a long time in old-fashioned AI, but unlike other sciences (where the same publish-or-perish rules apply), in AI this has resulted in such dismal progress that people have had to go looking for excuses to explain why nothing seems to be happening. As a result, some people have come right out and said that AI is not really “about” building complete intelligent systems at all! People in the field have openly given up, and have started using the words “artificial intelligence” to mean something different than what it meant at the outset. For the last couple of decades (at least) the words have been used to mean “slightly fancy type of computer program”, plus there are a lot of excuses about why it is okay to use the words that way.
People in the new Artificial General Intelligence community are reacting to this abysmal trend. This fact should be obvious enough if you know the first thing about AGI, but what is more important, from the investors’ point of view, is that the AGI people are consciously breaking the mold, defying old taboos and thinking for themselves. In scientific and technological research, there is nothing so vibrant, so fertile, and so likely to cause a dramatic breakthrough as a gang of hot-headed revolutionaries.
This is why you should invest in AGI. The old AI folks gave up years ago, but the AGI community is lean, mean, hungry and hellbent on getting results.
Now to my second point, which is about what would happen if AGI succeeded. You’ve probably heard this story before, but it doesn’t hurt to tell it one more time.
If anyone can build a full-up, human level AGI, that system will be able to invent new knowledge by itself - new technology, new medicines, and, of course, new types of AGI that can function more quickly than the original AGI. If you can build one AGI that is as smart as the best medical researcher on the planet, you can duplicate that machine with all of its knowledge intact … something that has never been possible with human experts. And if you use AGI systems to develop better AGI systems, you could produce new systems that generate new discoveries much faster than we do. If, for example, the new systems function at one thousand times the speed of a human researcher, this would mean that new discoveries would start arriving at a rate of one thousand years of new science and technology per year.
This is wild, wild stuff, but (please!) don’t blame the wildness on pie-eyed AGI researchers, because this is just a regular part of the territory. AGI is just like that. It is not like any other technology in history: a better mousetrap does not have the side effect of making everything else in the world happen faster, but a better AGI does exactly that.
But now when all is said and done, and you have listened to all this special pleading, you the investor still need to decide whether you might be wasting your money if you dumped $10 million on one of these renegade, revolutionary AGI outfits. Suppose the team you decide to back is a bunch of idiots? What if they burn all the cash and produce nothing?
You know what? It won’t matter to you at all.
Why not? Because at this stage of the game what your investment will do is to get the AGI buzz into high gear, and this buzz will soon lead to the birth of hundreds of AGI companies. And if there are that many, and just one of them connects with the ball, you personally will get the benefit of the flood of inventions and medicines that will come on stream a short time later.
Would you really care if it was somebody else’s team that made it big, if your investment indirectly caused the entire planet to get all of the technology of the year 3000, tomorrow? By throwing a modest chunk of cash at one of these upstart AGI companies, you help to stimulate an industry, put egg on the collective face of the old-fashioned AI people, and wake the world up to some dramatic new possibilities for the future.
But, heck, don’t take any notice of what I say. Whatever you do, don’t invest in any AGI companies. Too risky by half. Waste of money. Give it to General Electric instead - they do mousetraps and missiles, which are the key to a better future. Don’t listen to me.
P.S. Do you think that AGI could actually have bad side effects? If you do, you need to contact me to schedule an interview. There are ways to do AGI (probably the only ways to do AGI) that would ensure that this technology is safer than Grandma’s Olde Fashioned Gooseberry Marmalade.
Hey, I’m serious: give me a call.
Comments
One Response to “An Open Letter to AGI Investors”
Leave a Reply
[...] Kurzweilian argument for what will happen once someone perfects artificial general intelligence (source): If anyone can build a full-up, human level AGI, that system will be able to invent new knowledge [...]