On Mon, 23 Aug 1999, O'Regan, Emlyn wrote:
> Robert Bradbury wrote:
> > What I should have said was: *no* business will ever fund the
> > development of self-replicating factories for *its* business.
> >
> > So you won't see the DESIGNERS designing a DESIGNER factory factory.
> >
> By this logic, real AI will never emerge.
That is a good point! I think the difference with AI is that we have a case where we are trying to figure out *how* to build a DESIGNER factory factory, without often considering the consequences of that [other than many dicussions in this group]. Its also true that most AI research isn't done by a *business*. The AI research which is done by a business is usually done in the framework of "limited"-I, i.e. I want a widget that understands speech, conventional programming does a pretty poor job, lets try another approach. There are people who would dearly love to have a programmer factory factory, they are called "managers", but you can be pretty sure that the "manager" doesn't want a manager factory factory.
Robert