YouSaid · the spoken record

Douglas Lenat

lines on the record: 176
first: 2021-09-15
most recent: 2021-09-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yes, exactly. And I'd also like to be remembered as someone who. Wasn't afraid to spend several decades on a project in a time when almost all of the Other forces, institutional forces and commercial forces are incenting people to go for short-term rewards.”
2021-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #221 – Douglas Lenat: Cyc and the Quest to Solve Common Sense Reasoning in AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a good question. That people think of me as one of the pioneers or inventors of The AI that is ubiquitous and that they take for granted, and so on, much the way that today we look back on the pioneers of electricity or the pioneers of similar types of technologies and so on as it's hard to imagine what life would be like if these people hadn't done what they did. So that's one thing that I'd like to be remembered as. Another is that”
2021-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #221 – Douglas Lenat: Cyc and the Quest to Solve Common Sense Reasoning in AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. I'm not going to have another 37 years to continue working on this. So we really do want Syk to make an impact in the world commercially, physically metaphysically in the next small number of years, two, three, five years, not two, three, five decades anymore. And so this is really driving me toward this sort of commercialization and increasingly widespread application of Psych, whereas before I felt that I could just sort of sit back, roll my eyes, wait till the world caught up, and now I don't feel that way anymore. I feel like I need to put in some effort to make the world aware of what we have and what it can do. And the good news from your point of view is that that's why I'm sitting here and more.”
2021-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #221 – Douglas Lenat: Cyc and the Quest to Solve Common Sense Reasoning in AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As I get older, I'm now over 70. So as I get older, it's more on my mind, especially as acquaintances and friends and especially mentors one by one are dying, so I can't avoid thinking about mortality. And I think that the good news from the point of view and the rest of the world is that that adds impetus to my need to succeed in a small number of years in the future.”
2021-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #221 – Douglas Lenat: Cyc and the Quest to Solve Common Sense Reasoning in AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Paths you have to follow, but remember that you're mortal, remember that you have a limited number of decade-sized bets to make with your life, and you should make each one of them count. And that's true in personal relationships. That's true in career choice. That's true in making discoveries and so on. And if you follow the path of least resistance, you'll find that you're optimizing for short periods of time and before you know it, you turn around and long periods of time have gone by without you ever really making a difference in the world.”
2021-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #221 – Douglas Lenat: Cyc and the Quest to Solve Common Sense Reasoning in AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Say you can make a difference. In order to make a difference, you're going to have to have the courage to follow through with ideas which other people might not immediately understand or support. You have to realize that if you make Some plan that's going to take an extended period of time to carry out, don't be afraid of that. That's true of. Physical training of your body that's true of Learning some profession. That's also true of innovation, that some innovations are not great ideas you can write down on a napkin and become an instant success if you turn out to be right. Some of them are”
2021-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #221 – Douglas Lenat: Cyc and the Quest to Solve Common Sense Reasoning in AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Couldn't get anyone seriously to listen to him, and he had to ultimately inject himself with the bacteria to show that he suddenly developed a life-threatening ulcer in order to get other doctors to seriously consider that. So there are all sorts of things where humans are locked into paradigms, what Thomas Kuhn called paradigms. And we can't get out of them very easily. So a lot of AI is locked into the deep learning machine learning paradigm right now. And almost all of us and almost all sciences are locked into current paradigms and Kuhn's point was pretty much you have to wait for people to die in order for the new generation to escape those paradigms. And I think that one of the things that would change that sad reality is if we had trusted AGIs that could”
2021-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #221 – Douglas Lenat: Cyc and the Quest to Solve Common Sense Reasoning in AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or in the case of superconductivity, you have this V equals IR equation where R is resistance and so on. And it was being mapped at lower and lower temperatures, but everyone thought that was just bump on a log research to show that V equals IR always held. And then when some graduate student got to a slightly lower temperature and showed that resistance suddenly dropped off everyone just assumed that they did it wrong. And it was only a little while later that they realized it was actually a new phenomenon. Or in the case of the H pylori bacteria causing stomach ulcers where everyone thought that stress and stomach acid caused ulcers. And when a doctor in Australia claimed it was actually a bacterial infection, he”
2021-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #221 – Douglas Lenat: Cyc and the Quest to Solve Common Sense Reasoning in AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are not being talked about by anyone. Some of those may become infeasible or reprehensible or something, but some of them might be actually great things to look at. If you go back and look at some of the most powerful discoveries that have been made, like relativity and superconductivity and so on, a lot of them were cases where Someone took seriously the idea that there might actually be a non-obvious answer to a question. So in Einstein's case, it was, yeah, the Lorentz transformation is known. Nobody believes that it's actually the way reality works. What if it were the way that reality actually worked? So a lot of people don't realize he didn't actually work out that equation. He just sort of took it seriously.”
2021-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #221 – Douglas Lenat: Cyc and the Quest to Solve Common Sense Reasoning in AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Given that the AGI is going to be somewhat different from human intelligence, it's still going to make some mistakes that we wouldn't make, but it's also possibly going to notice some blind spots we have. And I would love as a test of is it really on a par with our intelligences, can it help spot some of the blind spots that we have?”
2021-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #221 – Douglas Lenat: Cyc and the Quest to Solve Common Sense Reasoning in AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Looking at all of Content Out there on the web and so on. Are some possible solutions to big problems that the world has that? People haven't really thought of before that are not being Properly, or at least adequately Pursued. What are some novel solutions that you can think of that we haven't that might work and that might be worth considering? So”
2021-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #221 – Douglas Lenat: Cyc and the Quest to Solve Common Sense Reasoning in AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or even if we're not hoping for it to fail, we're fascinated by it. And in terms of what we find interesting. The one in a thousand failures, much more interesting than the 999 boring successes.”
2021-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #221 – Douglas Lenat: Cyc and the Quest to Solve Common Sense Reasoning in AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bad stories about powerful companies and powerful entities. When I was at a coincidentally Japanese fifth generation computing system conference in 1987, while I happened to be there, there was a worker at an auto plant who was despondent and committed suicide by climbing under the safety chains and so on and getting stamped to death by a machine. And instead of being a small story that said despondent worker commits suicide, it was front page news that effectively said robot kills worker because the public is just waiting for stories about like AI kills phonogenic family of five. Stories. And even if you could show that nationwide, this system saved more lives than it cost and saved more injuries, prevented more injuries than it caused and so on, the media, the public, the government is just”
2021-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #221 – Douglas Lenat: Cyc and the Quest to Solve Common Sense Reasoning in AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's dangerous. But think about this is all part of why I think that autonomous vehicles truly autonomous vehicles are farther out than most people do because there is this enormous level of complexity which goes beyond mechanically controlling the car. I can see the autonomous vehicles as a kind of metaphorical and literal accident waiting to happen. And not just because of their overall Incurring versus preventing accidents and so on. But just because of the almost voracious appet”
2021-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #221 – Douglas Lenat: Cyc and the Quest to Solve Common Sense Reasoning in AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Drivers certainly are always doing this kind of estimate, even if it's unconscious, subconscious, of what are the chances of various bad outcomes happening. Like, for instance, if I don't wait for this pedestrian or something like that, and what is the downside to me going to be in terms of time wasted talking to the police or getting sent to jail or things like that?”
2021-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #221 – Douglas Lenat: Cyc and the Quest to Solve Common Sense Reasoning in AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I mean, you're talking about autonomous vehicles, right? So autonomous vehicles are going to have to make those decisions all the time of what is the chance of this bad event happening, how bad is that compared to this chance of that bad event happening and so on. And when a potential accident is about to happen, is it worth taking this risk if I have to make a choice? Which of these two cars am I going to hit and why?”
2021-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #221 – Douglas Lenat: Cyc and the Quest to Solve Common Sense Reasoning in AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I really disagree. I think it needs to understand the value of human life, especially the value of human life to other humans. And understand that certain things are more important than other things. It has to have a lot of knowledge about ethics and morality and so on.”
2021-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #221 – Douglas Lenat: Cyc and the Quest to Solve Common Sense Reasoning in AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“AI doesn't have to have. Fear of death as a motivating force in that we can build in motivation. So we can build in the motivation of Obeying users and making users happy and making others happy. And so on. And that can substitute for this sort of personal fear of death that sometimes leads to bursts of creativity in humans.”
2021-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #221 – Douglas Lenat: Cyc and the Quest to Solve Common Sense Reasoning in AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think so. I think it may help some humans to be better people. It may help some humans to be more creative and so on. I don't think it's necessary for AIs to believe that they have limited lifespans and therefore they should make the most of their behavior. Maybe eventually the answer to that and my answer to that will change. But as of now, I would say that that's almost like a frill or a side effect that is not. In fact, if you look at most humans, most humans ignore the fact that they're going to die most of the time.”
2021-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #221 – Douglas Lenat: Cyc and the Quest to Solve Common Sense Reasoning in AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If a computer program, if an AI is able to exhibit all the same kinds of response as you would expect of a conscious entity, then doesn't it deserve the label of consciousness just as much?”
2021-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #221 – Douglas Lenat: Cyc and the Quest to Solve Common Sense Reasoning in AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, but you know, what does that really mean? It's like, well, if I talk to you, you say things which make me believe that you're conscious. I know that I'm conscious, but that's, you know, you're just taking my word for it now. But in the same sense, psych is conscious in that same sense already, where, of course, it understands it's a computer program, it understands when it's running, it understands who's talking to it, it understands what its task is, what its goals are, what its current problem is that it's working on. It understands how long it's spent on things, what it's tried, it understands what it's done in the past, and so on. If we want to call that consciousness, then yes, psych is already conscious. But I don't think that I would ascribe anything mystical to that, again, some people would, but I would say that other than our own personal experience of consciousness, we're just treating everyone else in the world, so to speak, at their word about being conscious. And so if”
2021-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #221 – Douglas Lenat: Cyc and the Quest to Solve Common Sense Reasoning in AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Knowledge of it and being able to correctly make use of that is certainly an important facility, but actually having a body, if you believe that, that's just a kind of religious or mystical belief. You can't really argue for or against it, I suppose. It's just something that some people believe.”
2021-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #221 – Douglas Lenat: Cyc and the Quest to Solve Common Sense Reasoning in AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good question. I think in the case of a body, no, I know there are a lot of people like Penrose who would have disagreed with me and so on and others. But no, I don't think it needs to have a body in order to be intelligent. I think that it needs to be able to talk about having a body and having sensations and having emotions and so on. It doesn't actually have to have all of that, but it has to understand it in the same way that Helen Keller was perfectly intelligent and able to talk about colors and sounds and shapes and so on, even though she didn't directly experience all the same things that the rest of us do.”
2021-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #221 – Douglas Lenat: Cyc and the Quest to Solve Common Sense Reasoning in AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because among the things they know is that he lived relatively recently and people don't really live 400 years and, you know, things like that. So that's, I think, a very important thing, which is if it's making mistakes which no normal, sane human would have made, then that's a really bad sign. And if it's not making those kinds of mistakes, then that's a good sign. And I don't think it's any one very, very simple test. I think it's all of the things you mentioned, all the things I mentioned. There's really a battery of tests, which together, if it passes almost all of these tests, would be hard to argue that it's not intelligent. And if it fails several of these tests, it's really hard to argue that it really understands what it's doing and that it really is generally intelligent.”
2021-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #221 – Douglas Lenat: Cyc and the Quest to Solve Common Sense Reasoning in AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So here's what I would say is that As impressive as that was. It made some mistakes, but more importantly Many of the mistakes it made were mistakes which no human would have made. So, part of the new or augmented Turing tests would have to be, and the mistakes you make are ones which humans don't basically look at and say what? So, for example, there was a A question about which 16th century Italian politician blah blah blah and Watson said, Ronald Reagan. So most Americans would have gotten that question wrong. But they would never have said Ronald Reagan as an answer.”
2021-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #221 – Douglas Lenat: Cyc and the Quest to Solve Common Sense Reasoning in AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and again, that's not the only test. Another one has to do with argumentation. In other words, here's a proposition. Come up with pro and con arguments for it and try and give me convincing arguments on both sides. And so that's another important kind of ability that the system needs to be able to exhibit in order to really be intelligent, I think.”
2021-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #221 – Douglas Lenat: Cyc and the Quest to Solve Common Sense Reasoning in AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The test has to be something involving. Depth of reasoning and recursiveness of reasoning, the ability to answer repeated why questions about the answer you just gave.”
2021-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #221 – Douglas Lenat: Cyc and the Quest to Solve Common Sense Reasoning in AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ask you this question. Absolutely. Machines can think, certainly as well as humans can think. We're meat machines just because they're not currently made out of meat is just an engineering solution decision and so on. So of course machines can think. I think that there was a lot of Damage done by people misunderstanding Turing's imitation game and focus on trying to get a chat bot to fool other people into thinking it was human and so on, that's not a terrible test in and of itself, but it shouldn't be your one and only test for intelligence.”
2021-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #221 – Douglas Lenat: Cyc and the Quest to Solve Common Sense Reasoning in AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll tell you a sad story about Mathcraft, which is why is that not widely used in schools today? We're not really trying to make big profit on it or anything like that. When we've gone to schools, their attitude has been, well, if a student spends 20 hours going through this mathcraft program from start to end and so on, will it improve their score on this standardized test more than if they spent 20 hours just doing mindless drills of problem after problem after problem? And the answer is, well, no, but it'll increase their understanding more and their attitude is, well, if it doesn't increase their score on this test, then that's not, you know, we're not going to adopt it.”
2021-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #221 – Douglas Lenat: Cyc and the Quest to Solve Common Sense Reasoning in AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“World. So, if you imagine a sentence like the horse was led into the barn while its head was still wet. And so its head refers to the horse's head. But how do you know that? And so some people will say, I just know it. Some people will say, well, the horse was the subject of the sentence. And I'll say, okay, well, what about the horse was led into the barn while its roof was still wet? Now its roof obviously refers to the barn. And so then they'll say, oh, well, that's because it's the closest noun and so on. So basically if they try to give me answers which are based on syntax and grammar and so on, that's a really bad sign. But if they're able to say things like, well, horses have heads and barns don't and barns have roofs and horses don't, then that's a positive sign that they're going to be good at this because they can introspect on what's true in the world that leads you to know certain things.”
2021-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #221 – Douglas Lenat: Cyc and the Quest to Solve Common Sense Reasoning in AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Another is if you're able to introspect. So very often we'll give someone a simple question and we'll say like why is this? And sometimes they'll just say because it is, okay, that's a bad sign. But very often they'll be able to introspect and so on. So one of the questions I often ask is I'll point to a sentence with a pronoun in it and I'll say, you know, the referend of that pronoun is obviously this noun over here. How would you or I or an AI or a five-year-old 10 year old child know that that pronoun refers to that noun over here? And often the people who are going to be good at ontological engineering will give me some causal explanation or will refer to some things that are true in the world.”
2021-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #221 – Douglas Lenat: Cyc and the Quest to Solve Common Sense Reasoning in AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can be good enough. So, part of it has to do with being able to make and appreciate and react negatively appropriately to puns and other jokes. So you have to have a kind of sense of humor. And if you're good at telling jokes and good at understanding jokes, that's one indicator.”
2021-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #221 – Douglas Lenat: Cyc and the Quest to Solve Common Sense Reasoning in AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or back when I was young, there was the practice of having matchbooks where on the inside of the matchbook there would be a can you draw this? You have a career in art. A commercial art, if you can copy this drawing and so on. So, yes, the analog of that.”
2021-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #221 – Douglas Lenat: Cyc and the Quest to Solve Common Sense Reasoning in AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Language and knowledge Is very much like what Alan Turing had to do during World War II in trying to find people to bring to Bletchley Park where he would publish in the London Times cryptic crossword puzzles along with some innocuous looking note which essentially said if you were able to solve this puzzle in less than 15 minutes please call this phone number and so on so”
2021-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #221 – Douglas Lenat: Cyc and the Quest to Solve Common Sense Reasoning in AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More trained ontological engineers, some of which would be working for us, but mostly would be working for partners or customers or something. And if we could do that, that would create an enormous number of relatively very high paying jobs for people who currently have no way out of some situation that they're locked into.”
2021-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #221 – Douglas Lenat: Cyc and the Quest to Solve Common Sense Reasoning in AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How good they're going to be at coming up to speed in doing this kind of ontological engineering and writing these assertions and rules and so on in psych. And so very often we'll interview candidates who have their PhD in philosophy, who've taught logic for years and so on. And they're just awful. But the converse is true. So one of the best ontological engineers we ever had never graduated high school. And so the purpose of knowledge aximization institute, if we can get some foundations to help support it, is identify people in the general population, maybe high school dropouts, who have latent talent for this sort of thing, offer them effectively scholarships to train them, and then help place them in companies that need”
2021-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #221 – Douglas Lenat: Cyc and the Quest to Solve Common Sense Reasoning in AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, here's something that may make you feel better. A little bit better. We've formed a not-for-profit company called the Knowledge Aximidization Institute, NAX, KNAX I have this firm belief with a lot of empirical evidence to support it that The education that people get in high schools, in colleges, in graduate schools, and so on is almost completely orthogonal to, almost completely irrelevant to”
2021-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #221 – Douglas Lenat: Cyc and the Quest to Solve Common Sense Reasoning in AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That captures that and takes maybe not two arguments, takes maybe three, four, five arguments, and so on. And now we have effectively converted some complicated if-then rule Might have to have inference done on it into some ground atomic formula, which is just the name of a relation and a few arguments and so on. And so converting commonly occurring types or schemas of rules into brand new predicates, brand new functions turns out to enormously speed up the inference process. So now we've covered about four of the 150 good ideas I said that.”
2021-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #221 – Douglas Lenat: Cyc and the Quest to Solve Common Sense Reasoning in AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Store the transitive closure, the cleany star of that transitive relation. Now you have this big table, but you can always guarantee that in one single step you can just look up whether this is larger than that. And so there are lots of cases where storage is cheap today. And so by having this extra redundant data structure, we can answer this commonly occurring type of question very, very efficiently. Let me give you one other analogy, analog of that, which is something we call rule macro predicates, which is we'll see this complicated rule and we'll notice that things very much like it syntactically come up again and again and again. So we'll create a whole brand new relation or predicate or function.”
2021-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #221 – Douglas Lenat: Cyc and the Quest to Solve Common Sense Reasoning in AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The point is that the language you program in isn't really that important. It's more that you have to be able to think in terms of, for instance, creating new helpful HL modules and how they'll work with each other and looking at things that are taking a long time and coming up with new specialized data structures that will make this efficient. So let me just give you one very simple example, which is when you have a transitive relation like larger than, this is larger than that, which is larger than that, which is larger than that. So the first thing must be larger than the last thing. Whenever you have a transitive relation, if you're not careful, if I ask whether this thing over here is larger thing over here, I'll have to do some kind of graph walk or theorem proving that might involve like five or ten or twenty or 30 steps. But if you store redundantly,”
2021-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #221 – Douglas Lenat: Cyc and the Quest to Solve Common Sense Reasoning in AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The other thing is remember that we're talking about hiring programmers to do inference who are programmers interested in effectively automatic theorem proving. And so those are people already predisposed to representing things in logic and so on. And Lisp really was the programming language based on logic that John McCarthy and others who developed it basically took the formalisms that Alonso Church and other philosophers, other logicians had come up with and basically said, can we basically make a programming language which is effectively logic? And so since we're talking about reasoning about expressions written in this logical, epistemological language, and we're doing operations which are effectively like theorem proving type operations and so on, there's a natural impedance match between Lisp and the knowledge the way it's represented.”
2021-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #221 – Douglas Lenat: Cyc and the Quest to Solve Common Sense Reasoning in AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it is true when a new inference programmer comes on board, they need to learn some of Lisp. And in fact, we have a subset of Lisp, which we call cleverly sub L. Which is really all they need to learn. And so the programming actually goes on in sub L, not in full Lisp. And so it does not take programmers very long at all to learn sub L. And that's something which can then be translated efficiently into Java. And for some of our programmers who are doing, say, user interface work, then they never have to even learn sub-L. They just have to learn APIs into the basic Psyc engine.”
2021-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #221 – Douglas Lenat: Cyc and the Quest to Solve Common Sense Reasoning in AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, development Of programs in Lisp precedes, I think, somewhere between $1,000 and $50,000 faster than development in any of what you're calling modern or improved computer languages.”
2021-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #221 – Douglas Lenat: Cyc and the Quest to Solve Common Sense Reasoning in AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so it's based on Lisp code that we produced. Most of the programming is still going on in a dialect of Lisp. And then for efficiency reasons, that gets automatically translated into things like Java or C nowadays. It's almost all translated into Java because Java has gotten good enough that that's really all we need to do.”
2021-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #221 – Douglas Lenat: Cyc and the Quest to Solve Common Sense Reasoning in AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yes, it's wonderful, but it's very much like the Eloy and the Morlocks in H.G. Wells Time Machine. So you have the Eloy who only program in the epistemological Higher order logic language And then you have the Morlocks who are like under the ground figuring out what the machinery is that will make this efficiently operate and so on. And so occasionally they'll toss messages back to each other and so on, but it really is almost this 50-50 split between finding clever ways to recoup efficiency when you have an expressive language and putting in the content of what the system needs to know.”
2021-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #221 – Douglas Lenat: Cyc and the Quest to Solve Common Sense Reasoning in AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say it's half of the problem in the following empirical sense, which is over the years, about half of our effort, maybe 40% of our effort has been our team of inference programmers and the other 50-60% has been our ontologists, our ontological engineers putting in knowledge. So our ontological engineers in most cases don't even know how to program. They have degrees in things like philosophy and so on. So it's almost like the. I love that. I'd love to hang out”
2021-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #221 – Douglas Lenat: Cyc and the Quest to Solve Common Sense Reasoning in AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and so by now we have about 150 of these sort of like. Breakthrough ideas that have led to dramatic speed ups in the inference process, where one of them was this ELHL split and lots of HL modules. Another one was using meta and meta-meta level reasoning to reason about the reasoning that's going on and so on. And 150 breakthroughs may sound like a lot. But if you divide by 37 years, it's not as impressive.”
2021-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #221 – Douglas Lenat: Cyc and the Quest to Solve Common Sense Reasoning in AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So instead, what you want to do is give it meta level advice, tactical and strategic advice that enables it to reason about what kind of knowledge is going to be relevant to this problem, what kind of tactics are going to be good to take in trying to attack this problem, when is it time to start trying to prove the negation of this thing because I'm knocking myself out trying to prove it's true and maybe it's false. And if I just spend a minute, I can see that it's false or something.”
2021-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #221 – Douglas Lenat: Cyc and the Quest to Solve Common Sense Reasoning in AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We use just for aqueous chemistry equations, or here's a special representation and a special technique, which we can now apply to things in this special representation and so on. And then you add that as the thousand and first HL heuristic level module. And from then on, in any application, if it ever comes up again, it'll be able to contribute and so on. So that's pretty much one of the main ways in which Psych has recouped this loss efficiency. A second important way is meta-reasoning. So you can speed things up by focusing on removing knowledge from the system till all it has left is like minimal knowledge needed to, but that's the wrong thing to do, right? That would be like in a human extirpating part of their brain or something. That's really bad.”
2021-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #221 – Douglas Lenat: Cyc and the Quest to Solve Common Sense Reasoning in AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Notes on a whiteboard and making additional notes when they think they can be helpful and gradually that community of agents gets an answer to your question, gets a solution to your problem. And if we ever come up in a domain application where psych is getting the right answer but taking too long, then what will often do is talk to one of the human experts and say here's the set of reasoning steps that Psych went through. You can see why it took it a long time to get the answer. How is it that you were able to answer that question in two seconds and occasionally you'll get an expert who just says, well, I just know it. I just was able to do it or something. And then you don't talk to them anymore. But sometimes you'll get an expert who says, well, let me introspect on that. Yes, here is a special representation.”
2021-09-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #221 – Douglas Lenat: Cyc and the Quest to Solve Common Sense Reasoning in AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source