From: Ben Goertzel (ben@goertzel.org)
Date: Thu Jun 13 2002 - 15:17:44 MDT
> As a thought exercise I have wondered that if one can imagine a time in
> the future in which AGI is prevalent, then imagine a homework assignment
> given to a high school student: "achieve an AGI from scratch over the
> weekend".
I dunno... some things are just *intrinsically* too complicated for weekend
assignments.
Consider e.g. a compiler. A real compiler can be built in a semester course
(just barely). Of course, you could build a "compiler-makers toolkit" that
would allow a compiler to be built in a weekend, but then the student
wouldn't really be learning the nitty-gritty of how compilers work, just the
high-level architecture.
Similarly, building a car from scratch takes more than a weekend -- unless
you're doing it from a kit that obscures the nasty details from you (and
hence prevents you from learning nearly as much as you could from doing it
the harder way)
I think that in a few decades, it will be possible for students in an AI
class to build an AGI during the course of a semester, making use of
programming languages and toolkits that are nowhere near available as yet.
And then, second-semester AI will have to be renamed "Early Childhood
Education" ;->
-- Ben G
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