Hi, this is Ben Goertzel, the chief founder of the OpenCog AGI-focused software project and of the AGI conference series.
Comparing Google Search and IBM Watson to OpenCog and other early-stage research efforts is silly. Google Search and IBM Watson have taken fairly mature technologies, pioneered by others over decades of research, and productized them fantastically. OpenCog is a research project and is aimed at breaking fundamentally new research ground, not at productizing and scaling-up technologies already basically described in the academic literature.
Lecturing is a very small percentage of what those of us involved with OpenCog do. We are building complex software and developing associated theory. Indeed parts of our approach are speculative, and founded in intuition alongside math and empirics. That's how early-stage research often goes.
Of course you can trash all early-stage research as not having results yet. And the majority of early-stage research will fail, probably making you tend to feel vindicated and high and mighty in your skepticism ;p .... But then, a certain percentage of early-stage research will succeed, because of researchers having the guts to follow their intuitions in spite of the ceaseless tedious sniping of folks like you ;p ...
Comparing Google Search and IBM Watson to OpenCog and other early-stage research efforts is silly. Google Search and IBM Watson have taken fairly mature technologies, pioneered by others over decades of research, and productized them fantastically. OpenCog is a research project and is aimed at breaking fundamentally new research ground, not at productizing and scaling-up technologies already basically described in the academic literature.
Lecturing is a very small percentage of what those of us involved with OpenCog do. We are building complex software and developing associated theory. Indeed parts of our approach are speculative, and founded in intuition alongside math and empirics. That's how early-stage research often goes.
Of course you can trash all early-stage research as not having results yet. And the majority of early-stage research will fail, probably making you tend to feel vindicated and high and mighty in your skepticism ;p .... But then, a certain percentage of early-stage research will succeed, because of researchers having the guts to follow their intuitions in spite of the ceaseless tedious sniping of folks like you ;p ...
- Ben Goertzel