Aron, I don’t think anyone really knows the general requirements for AGI, and therefore nobody knows what (if any) kind of specialized hardware is necessary. But if you’re a hardware guy and you want something to work on, you could read Pearl’s book (mentioned above) and find ways to implement some of the more computationally intensive inference algorithms in hardware. You might also want to look up the work by Geoff Hinton et al on reduced Boltzmann machines and try to implement the associated algorithms in hardware.
Eliezer, of course in order to construct AI we need to know what intelligence really is, what induction is, etc. But consider an analogy to economics. Economists understand the broad principles of the economy, but not the nuts and bolts details. The inability of the participants to fully comprehend the market system hardly inhibits its ability to function. A similar situation may hold for intelligence: we might be able to construct intelligent systems with only an understanding of the broad principles, but not the precise details, of thought.
Aron, I don’t think anyone really knows the general requirements for AGI, and therefore nobody knows what (if any) kind of specialized hardware is necessary. But if you’re a hardware guy and you want something to work on, you could read Pearl’s book (mentioned above) and find ways to implement some of the more computationally intensive inference algorithms in hardware. You might also want to look up the work by Geoff Hinton et al on reduced Boltzmann machines and try to implement the associated algorithms in hardware.
Eliezer, of course in order to construct AI we need to know what intelligence really is, what induction is, etc. But consider an analogy to economics. Economists understand the broad principles of the economy, but not the nuts and bolts details. The inability of the participants to fully comprehend the market system hardly inhibits its ability to function. A similar situation may hold for intelligence: we might be able to construct intelligent systems with only an understanding of the broad principles, but not the precise details, of thought.