The Singularity will begin with a cute Nintendog
It is fun to play with a puppy and teach it tricks - even one that lives in a computer screen. People enjoy it - dogs are “man’s best friend.”
But what if we hook all of the little cute puppies together into a central server somewhere on the internet. Now, all of the puppies are connected and are learning separately - and together. This way, they can learn a lot and quickly. And then you will have one really smart puppy.
That’s the plan of Novamente, a privately owned company that last year donated 1% of its stock to the Methuselah Foundation:
A virtual dog powered by Novamente’s AI, Goertzel says, would develop its own quirks. At the same time, each individual dog’s AI is connected to a greater whole, so anything it learns can be ready for all the others in almost real time. Balancing the collective dog AI with the individual dog’s AI to maintain each dog’s unique personality is a tricky problem. Goertzel says Novamente has it basically solved. But dogs are just the start.
The medium-term goal, Goertzel says, is a virtual parrot that talks. The natural language processing technology is not ready, but if it gets there, having widely distributed but interconnected virtual talking parrots could be a great way to train an AI to comprehend speech.
Goertzel argues that if virtual world behavior aligns at all with real world behavior, people will spend time and effort to get their virtual parrots to say the right things. The feedback loop described above would make each parrot more appealing to humans and make the AI increasingly capable of understanding speech.
