Re: Scenario for early hard takeoff

From: Toby Weston (LordLobster@yahoo.com)
Date: Tue Sep 04 2007 - 10:42:51 MDT


Whether or not Google really is building an AI is an open question, and is verging into tinfoil hat territory. BUT IF IT WERE...

Google answers, and crowd sourcing in general, is the best tool for bootstrapping a basic system up.

How many of the questions asked to Google Answers (or Amazons Turk) are asked by Google vimself?

The service could be used to access first person reports on the knowledge held in human brains. Or as a final check to clarify some subtle point that all the syntactic and semantic parsing or the web was failing to fully yield answers to.

- original message -
Subject: Re: Scenario for early hard takeoff
From: "David Orban" <david@davidorban.com>
Date: 04/09/2007 3:06 am

On 9/3/07, Mike Dougherty <msd001@gmail.com> wrote:
> would people be willing to host this distributed computing grid if
> participation was the only requisite for being able to ask it for
> information? What if the local agent were able to ask the users for
> information in order to fulfill requests for other others? Is this a
> manageable strategy, or is it really just chaos?

Google denies that they are building an AI, which I don't believe.
They have been observing a constant increase in the number of terms
comprising the queries, and with the results getting better as well,
what you have is basically a human computer dialog.

If you sum to this all the parts of the Google grid that do actually
reside on the local machine, such as Google Desktop, Google Pack,
Google Web Accelerator, Google Offline Reader, etc. with also the
personalized results that are a consequence of your search history,
then you do have millions of volunteers that are doing exactly what
you say. Since the PageRank algorithm's value is a consequence of
human linking, active participation is also a must (not on an
individual level but as a group).

It is definitely a manageable strategy, as Google showed us.
I would not be surprised if part of Powerset's tools would be based on
something similar as well.

D

--------
David Orban
www.davidorban.com
skype davidorban
sl davidorban

On 9/3/07, Mike Dougherty <msd001@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9/2/07, David Orban <david@davidorban.com> wrote:
> > So: less units, more powerful, and more flexibly connected. In my
> > opinion, if optimally used, with good software, and confronted with an
> > environment that enables the software to elaborate a coherent view of
> > the data supplied, this network would be able surprise us with its
> > behavior.
>
> would people be willing to host this distributed computing grid if
> participation was the only requisite for being able to ask it for
> information? What if the local agent were able to ask the users for
> information in order to fulfill requests for other others? Is this a
> manageable strategy, or is it really just chaos?
>



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:00:58 MDT