Future Current

Benjamin Johnston and Martin Magnusson at the AGI-08 post-conference workshop

Inhabiting the complex and dynamic environments of modern computer games with autonomous agents capable of intelligent timely behavior is a significant research challenge. Martin Magnusson illustrates this point speaking on the topic of his paper with Patrick Doherty using their own attempts to build a practical agent architecture on a logicist foundation.

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The AGI-08 Post-Conference Workshop session presented by Professor Hugo de Garis of Wuhan University investigates the possibility of a bitter controversy arising out of humanity’s capability of building massively intelligent machines. It foresees humanity splitting into three major camps: the Cosmists (in favor of building artilects), the Terrans (opposed to building artilects), and the Cyborgs (who want to become artilects themselves by adding components to their own human brains).

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Cognitive architectures play a vital role in providing blueprints for building future intelligent systems supporting a broad range of capabilities similar to those of humans. How useful are existing architectures for creating artificial general intelligence? At AGI-08 Wlodzislaw Duch presented on a critical survey by the speaker, Richard Oentaryo and Michel Pasquier of the state of the art in cognitive architectures, providing a useful insight into the possible frameworks for general intelligence.

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At the AGI-08 conference on artificial general intelligence, Brian Milch presented on his paper “Artificial General Intelligence through Large-Scale, Multimodal Bayesian Learning.” An artificial system that achieves human-level performance on open-domain tasks must have a huge amount of knowledge about the world. He argues that the most feasible way to construct such a system is to let it learn from the large collections of text, images, and video that are available online. More specifically, the system should use a Bayesian probability model to construct hypotheses about both specific objects and events, and general patterns that explain the observed data.

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In the introduction to the AGI-08 post-conference workshop on the futurological implications of artificial general intelligence, Novamente Chief Science Officer Ben Goertzel argued that it is worthwhile in planning for the future to put a certain amount of attention on the speculative aspects of present-day emerging technologies. The workshop’s introductory talk focuses on the significance of artificial general intelligence to the hypothesis of a technological singularity.

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At the AGI-08 post-conference workshop, Ben Goertzel presented on a paper by the speaker and the Singularity Institute’s director of open source projects, David Hart.  There he described the OpenCog software development framework for integrative artificial general intelligence. The framework’s libraries include a flexible knowledge representation embodied in a scalable knowledge store, a cognitive process scheduler, and a plug-in architecture for allowing interaction between cognitive, perceptual, and control algorithms.

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At the AGI-08 Conference on Artificial General Intelligence, Ben Goertzel presented on a paper by the speaker and Cassio Pennachin, in which series of hypotheses is proposed, connecting neural structures and dynamics with the formal structures and processes of probabilistic logic. In this framework, Hebbian learning at the synaptic level would be expected to have the implicit consequence of probabilistic deduction at the logical statement level.

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At AGI-08: The First Conference on Artificial General Intelligence, Ronald Arkin presented the second of three talks on the theory and formalisms for the implementation of an ethical control and reasoning system potentially suitable for constraining lethal actions in an autonomous robotic system. These controls are implemented so that they fall within the bounds prescribed by the Laws of War and Rules of Engagement, based upon extensions to existing deliberative/reactive autonomous robotic architectures. Part two of the series focused on Formalization of Ethical Control.

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Aubrey de Grey is the Chair and Chief Science Officer of the Methuselah Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to combating the aging process. In this talk presented at the February Silicon Valley transhumanist meetup, he outlined the several most notable developments in funding and research taking place at the Methuselah Foundation in late 2007 and early 2008.

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There are a wide variety of approaches to artificial intelligence. Yet interestingly we find that these can all be grouped into four broad categories: Silver Bullets, Core Values, Emergence, and Emulation. At AGI-08: The First Conference on Artificial General Intelligence, Jonathan Connell and Kenneth Livingston explained the methodological underpinnings of these categories and give examples of the type of work being pursued in each–understanding this spectrum of approaches can help defuse arguments between practitioners as well as elucidate common themes.

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Understanding why the original project of Artificial Intelligence is widely regarded as a failure and has been abandoned even by most of contemporary AI research itself may prove crucial to achieving synthetic intelligence. Here, Joscha Bach of the Institute for Cognitive Science, University of Osnabrück, Germany took a brief look at some principles that we might consider to be lessons from the past five decades of AI. The author’s own AI architecture, MicroPsi attempts to contribute to that discussion.

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Photo courtesy of Hugo de Garis

The first panel discussion of AGI-08 was on the subject of research methods for artificial general intelligence. Session chair Eric Baum started off by responding to presentations by panelists Jonathan Connell, Joscha Bach, Wlodzislaw Duch, and Pei Wang. Questions on the first of the conference’s presentations then were taken from the audience.

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