1.1 AI Returns to Its Roots

Chapter 1 Introduction 1.1 AI Returns to Its Roots Our goal in this book is straightforward, albeit ambitious: to present a conceptual and technical design for a thinking machine, a software program capable of the same qualitative sort of general intelligence as human beings. It’s not certain exactly how far the design outlined here will be able to take us, but it seems plausible that once fully implemented, tuned and tested, it will be able to achieve general intelligence at the human level and in some respects beyond. Our ultimate aim is Artificial General Intelligence construed in the broadest sense, including artificial creativity and artificial genius. We feel it is important to emphasize the extremely broad potential of Artificial General Intelligence systems. The human brain is not built to be modified, except via the slow process of evolution. Engineered AGI systems, built according to designs like the one outlined here, will be much more susceptible to rapid improvement from their initial state. It seems reasonable to us to expect that, relatively shortly after achieving the first roughly human-level AGI system, AGI systems with various sorts of beyond-human-level capabilities will be achieved. Though these long-term goals are core to our motivations, we will spend much of our time here explaining how we think we can make AGI systems do relatively simple things, like the things human children do in preschool. The penultimate chapter of (Part 2 of) the book describes a thought-experiment involving a robot playing with blocks, responding to the request "Build me something I haven’t seen before." We believe that preschool creativity contains the seeds of, and the core structures and dynamics underlying, adult human level genius ... and new, as yet unforeseen forms of artificial innovation. Much of the book focuses on a specific AGI architecture, which we call CogPrime, and which is currently in the midst of implementation using the OpenCog software framework. CogPrime is large and complex and embodies a host of specific decisions regarding the various aspects of intelligence. We don’t view CogPrime as the unique path to advanced AGI, nor as the ultimate end-all of AGI research. We feel confident there are multiple possible paths to advanced AGI, and that in following any of these paths, multiple theoretical and practical lessons will be learned, leading to modifications of the ideas possessed while along the early stages of the path. But our goal here is to articulate one path that we believe makes sense to follow, one overall design that we believe can work. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_012917