Supermodelling

The few people interested in this blog may have noticed that it has gone dormant.

After toying with the “AI problem” for a while it has become clear to me that nobody (including me) seems to have a very promising research agenda for making progress on building artificial minds.  It pains me to admit this… I had always thought that right around now would be the time when we’d start making some truly interesting progress on the fundamental issues underlying cognition.  But I don’t see any evidence at all that this is the case.  Assuming I have a more or less average lifespan, the clock is ticking.  I had really hoped to see this problem solved before my time is over… but I can’t point to a single insight made in the last decade that counts to me as actual progress toward general-purpose thinking machines.

The yearly AGI conference was this past weekend and I’m sure that the attendees would disagree with me, many of them thinking that they personally are on the right track and making tangible progress but unfortunately I just don’t see it.

None of that would bother me too much if I had a clear path of my own to explore, and if I were enjoying thinking about it, but alas that seems not to be the case.  I really do think that there is some potential for the idea of studying the “model-building” process and then wrapping that around on itself to model model-building itself.  That’s very vague, though, and I have not come up with much by way of connecting that to bits of computer code or other concrete applications.

So I’m going back to sleep for another five or ten years, unless some unexpected insight comes to me in a dream or I see somebody else come up with something promising.  In the meantime, I have always wistfully wanted to make music, despite having no training or demonstrated talent.  At some point, age-related degeneration of my joints and vocal cords will make that impractical so if I’m ever going to have a good try at expressing myself musically, I better give it a try now.  I have started a little bit and am having great fun.

Good luck to those of you who are more dedicated to this cause than I.  I’ll check in to see what you’ve been up to and have another shot at it myself around 2014 or so.  I sincerely hope that my grim assessment of the state of the art is wrong.

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