Saturday, November 20, 2010

Artificial Intelligence and Open Source

Via Instapundit, I came across this from the Foresight Institute:

Advances in electronics and spintronics will mean cheaper, more powerful computers, which will advance both computational nanotechnology and the development of artificial general intelligence.

This seems to conflict with Keith Curtis on development of artificial intelligence.  He says that AI needs to be open source, which it is not.  Here's a quote from his book After the Software Wars
Imagine 1000 people, broken up into groups of five, working on two hundred separate encyclopedias, versus that same number of people work on one encyclopedia?  Which one will be the best?  ..but it is exactly what is going on in artificial intelligence research today.  Some say free software doesn't work in theory, but it does work in practice.
 It may not be enough to have faster and faster computers.  The software is already behind hardware.  Perhaps those in charge of developing AI ought to consider open source software to fully exploit the hardware.

No comments: