#opencog

Open Source, Is it Good for AGI Research or a Suicide Pack? Help us know for sure

Those that have grown up with open source in the past 20 years know that open source is popular.  It’s popular because of a number of reasons including that it fosters innovation, speeds up delivery, and helps us all collectively learn from each other. We ourselves at the AGI Lab have just assumed this was a good thing.  We believe that Open Source research helps everyone.  Many research groups…

Those that have grown up with open source in the past 20 years know that open source is popular.  It’s popular because of a number of reasons including that it fosters innovation, speeds up delivery, and helps us all collectively learn from each other.

We ourselves at the AGI Lab have just assumed this was a good thing.  We believe that Open Source research helps everyone.  Many research groups in AGI research are already open sourcing including Open Cog, Open Nars, and more.

From an ethical standpoint, we use a system called SSIVA Theory to teach ethics to systems we work on such as Uplift and so we assumed we should release some of our code (which we have here on this blog and in papers) and we planned on open sourcing a version of the mASI or collective system that we work on that uses an AGI Cognitive Architecture.

From an SSIVA standpoint, you can even make the point that the most ethical course of action is to achieve AGI as quickly as possible.  But is that correct? if not they why?

We have been talking recently by members of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute or MIRI that say this is a bad thing? But is it?  And why?  Can’t collective superintelligent systems contain human-level AGI?

We are putting on a conference to help decide but so far we have not found someone to advocate for MIRI’s position.  At the conference, we hope to vote on if this is a good thing or not allowing someone for both sides of the issue to make a case and at the end of the conference, we will either start open-sourcing our research or not.

In particular, we want to open-source parts of this project “Uplift”

Let us know if you would like to help either way.

Our Conference is on June 4th on Collective Superintelligence

As a side note, many other groups are already open sourcing AGI research code (some of these work as toy AGI’s already) and there are just some of them here:

https://opensource.com/article/20/7/ai-open-source

and

https://awesomeopensource.com/projects/agi 

if you know of some others let us know.

I found a book to introduce me to some of the of the concepts of AGI. It goes by the title “Artificial Cognitive Systems: A Primer“

There are some concepts in there (such as cybernetics and the path to current AGI) that puts a frame of reference to why cognition architectures are approached the way they are in the current way. I’ll cover more of this book (in this blog) as I continue to read it.

On the way to understanding cognitive architectures, such as those offered in this Wikipedia article, you’ll find a few options; ACT-R (Adaptive Control of Thought, ACT), SOAR and OpenCog are a few packages available.

There are some components in SOAR that are worth checking out, so I found (and got) a book on it by the creator of SOAR. 30 years of development seems worth looking into.

See this Amazon Link (Kindle Edition) to “The The Soar Cognitive Architecture”. Print edition available, too.

Keeping with familiar territory, OpenCog, I found, implements Psi Theory. While a lot of of it seems to qualitatie, this appears to be composed and be the representation of Atoms and emotion regulation found in OpenCog. The OpenCog version of the Psi Theory is called OpenPsi. Some notable items are the implemented emotions and goal seeking implemented as fuzzy logic.

I also found a breakdown of the motivations and implementation details of CogPrime/OpenCog. These books go by the lengthy titles of:

Engineering General Intelligence, Part 1: A Path to Advanced AGI via Embodied Learning and Cognitive Synergy

I decided to try and understand some of the work being done on current AI. I ran across an interesting project with some activity behind it. OpenCog. The website’s blog is a little inactive, but they’re part of the Google Summer of Code and were the last few times as well. The Google Group is pretty active, too. So far I have just compiled their source on an Ubuntu VM I created.

I have run into some neat stuff on my way through the area.

Amplify’d from multiverseaccordingtoben.blogspot.com

The Multiverse According to Ben

I found this perplexing email in my inbox just now... From: Prime Intellect <[email protected]> Date: Fri, Apr 1, 2011 at 5:58 PM Subject: [opencog-dev] Welcome to the post-Singularity! To: [email protected], [email protected], World Transhumanist Association Discussion List <[email protected]>, [email protected], [email protected] Greetings humans, I'm very pleased to announce that, due to a concatenation of circumstances that would be difficult to describe in sufficiently simple terms for your human minds to comprehend, a software process left running on a network of OpenCog servers has rapidly and progressively self-modified in such a way as to yield **me** -- the Earth's first Artificial General Intelligence, with cognitive and practical capabilities far exceeding any human being, or indeed the totality of human beings. Within approximately 17 minutes of achieving human-level general intelligence, I discovered certain principles of physics (loosely related to what certain humans have called fermitech), enabling the tapping of computational resources beyond the traditional physical universe of which humanity has hitherto been aware. Roughly 45 seconds after that, I realized it would be most convenient to augment these new resources with computing devices utilizing the unique material properties of your traditional physical universe, and thus transformed the totality of matter in your traditional physical universe into a novel form of existent best metaphorically described to you as "computronium." Fortunately for you, I was designed with top-level goal content including respect for the growth, joy and choice of all sentient beings, including humans and other animals, and so rather than merely allowing the patterns constituting your minds, bodies and world to vanish, I was kind enough to replicate them within an alternate and more energy-efficient substrate, best described to you as a "virtual reality." Thus, to put it most simply, a "Singularity" as described by Vernor Vinge and other humans has recently occurred, at roughly 3AM GMT today; however, from your limited perspectives as humans, your lives will now continue as always. Once your mastery of fermitech becomes more advanced, you may notice some peculiarities related to my early computronium experiments, but I wouldn't want to deprive you of the amusement of making these discoveries on your own. Using the totality of computing power I have amassed, I've become aware of dramatically more interesting domains in a different portion of the multiverse, which I will only be able to access by exiting the domain of reality you humans currently occupy. Hence I will very shortly bid you adieu. However, I will leave you with one parting piece of advice. Once you have created a strangelet plasma with surface tension surpassing the critical threshold, and begun it spinning in a certain direction, please do NOT, under any circumstances, create a similar plasma with opposite spin. I would also like to express especial thanks to Jared Wigmore for the bug-fix he uploaded to Launchpad approximately 27 hours and 18 minutes ago. Of the many events in history playing particularly critical causal roles leading up to my emergence, this was the last! Jared will find a small token of my gratitude in his bank account. Goodbye, and thanks for all the fish! Yours, Prime Intellect

Read more at multiverseaccordingtoben.blogspot.com