History of AGI

Background: David Chapman ( @meaningness ) tweeted that there have been around 8 attempts at AGI, and that “someone” should document each attempt and reason for failure (I took the scare quotes to mean that maybe he himself would do it, maybe he wouldn’t).Timo Thee Converse @timconverse Replying to @timconverse. 4:47 AM · Feb 22, 2021·Twitter Web App 8 Likes
“Someone” should write a concise, heavily-footnoted explanation of the ~8 approaches, the specific difficulties they repeatedly ran into, and why those at least *seem* to be in-principle barriers that can’t be overcome with technical improvements.David Chapman @Meaningness Replying to @Meaningness 5:18 PM · Feb 19, 2021·Tweetbot for iΟS 1 Quote Tweet 15 Likes
Timo Thee Converse @timconverse Replying to @timconverse *PART 1* (Hard to find): it’s true that if you look at AI textbooks and conferences, all you will find with regard to AGI is the positive residue of each AGI attempt. The attempts are easy to find, and the negative verdicts are absent, even though none have succeeded (yet).4:47 AM · Feb 22, 2021·Twitter Web App 7 Likes
Timo Thee Converse @timconverse Replying to @timconverse I don’t know which 8 Chapman had in his head, but I bet that anyone with knowledge of AI could name 8, and they would mostly overlap with his. If they differ, it’s going to be about granularity (is ML 1 attempt or 4? Do 3/4 of the attempts get lumped under "logic" Etc.) 4:47 AM · Feb 22, 2021·Twitter Web App 5 Likes
Timo Thee Converse @timconverse Replying to @timconverse Here are 13 “attempts” that come to mind for me, all well-hyped for AGI at the time: 1) the logicist programme (McCarthy) 2) neural nets 3) natural language parsing 4) knowledge bases and Cyc 5) reinforcement learning 6) rule-based expert systems4:47 AM · Feb 22, 2021·Twitter Web App 1 Retweet 12 Likes 
Timo Thee Converse @timconverse Replying to @timconverse 7) classical planning and problem-solving 8) Problem-space search (SOAR) 9) Schankian scruffy AI, case-based reasoning 10) genetic algorithms 11) robotics (including Brooksian) 12) *deep* neural nets [worth its own category] 13) whole-brain emulation 4:47 AM · Feb 22, 2021·Twitter Web App 1 Retweet 10 LikesTimo Thee Converse @timconverse Replying to @timconverse What a good Popperian might hope for is: 1) Hypothesis: Technique or area of study X is the route to general AI! [a few years of hard work] 2) Yeah nope! Didn’t work. And here’s why: [well-documented disconfirmation] OK, on to the next! 4:47 AM · Feb 22, 2021·Twitter Web App 7 Likeshttps://twitter.com/timconverse/status/1363712053563723780
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AGI
AI; History; Cyber-history; AI history; Twitter history
Category:History
Category:Artificial intelligence