Developers are needed who will work on their own to initiate
artificial intelligence (AI) projects based on the Wikipedia
free on-line encyclopedia. The SourceForge Mind project is
already such a project, and it has spawned or spun off the
http://AIMind-I.com project.
Wikipedia has grown so large that it may serve first as the
referential background for open-source artificial intelligence
and then as food for thought when the emerging AI Minds try
to know and understand the world around them.
One problem in conducting an
open-source AI project is
bringing new cadres of AI developers up to speed with
the knowledge and expertise necessary to work on AI.
AI is so difficult that many Netizens consider it as a
Grand Challenge to humanity. The concepts and terminology
involved are so abstruse that even AI experts have difficulty
in comprehending and evaluating the properties and merits
of any AI project that has evolved beyond the borders of
traditional "Good Old-Fashioned AI" (
GOFAI). AI students
have difficulty in understanding the multidisciplinary
concepts involved in AI, and non-English-speakers have
difficulty in penetrating the language barrier of highly
technical AI documentation papers. Depending on the skills
of the newcomer to an AI project, the barriers to entry are
seemingly elastic -- diminishing if the arriviste is an expert,
or expanding if the new recruit is a rank amateur with or
without English-language skills. If only there were a massive
reservoir of knowledge in all possible
fields pertinent to AI,
a kind of gigantic encyclopedia constantly expanding to
assimilate the burgeoning frontiers of knowledge in AI and
in all other fields even remotely connected to AI.
Well, Wikipedia is such a made-to-order encyclopedia -- free
for the websurfing, and constantly expanding even as the realm
of human knowledge expands. The only question is, how does one
piggyback an
open-source AI project on top of Wikipedia?
For a modular AI project, as opposed to a monolithic AI project,
the answer is to document each AI mind-module with an apparatus
of highly germane links into Wikipedia. For each module, such as
the
speech output module, there will be links to various Wikpedia
articles on speech, like the following.
AI experts evaluating a particular project may encounter such a link-cluster
and bypass it after cursory inspection, but AI newcomers may visit Wikipedia
to study up on the background knowledge pertinent to any given AI mind-module.
Thus the symbiosis between open-source AI and Wikipedia is many things to
many people -- unnecessary fluff to an AI expert; useful references for a
midway-experienced AI programmer; or a complete course in AI grounding
for the totally new recruit to
open-source AI.
All AI textbooks heretofore published are obsolete.
AI textbooks published on dead-tree paper can not possibly keep up
with Wikipedia as the evolving, mutating, metastasizing textbook of
not only AI but of any other discipline whose adherents have the
skill and motivation to index from the chosen field into Wikipedia.
Each Wikipedia article is like a living organism, sometimes splitting
in two, and sometimes spawning child articles with a life of their own.
Once an AI project guru maps the existing set of AI-related Wikipedia
articles onto the existing webpages of AI project documentation,
a kind of symbiosis ensues where the
state of the art in AI must
keep in touch with the state of the Wikipedia
knowledge base.
Recruiting for open-source AI among the genius Wikipedia editors.
Let's face it. Geniuses and the elite of computer experts are editing
Wikipedia. Once they
stumble upon Wikipedia, they devote thousands of
hours to expanding the Wikipedia knowledge base. They train themselves
to work together and hammer out a consensus agreement on any topic.
Now consider what will happen (not immediately, but over time) if many
people who previously never heard of Wikipedia discover the free on-line
encyclopedia only as a result of getting deeply immersed in an open-source
AI project. Many of the generally genius-level AI devotees will instantly
be drawn to the magic of Wikipedia and will become editors of Wikipedia.
Then a two-way flow of information will occur. AI devotees will learn
their AI background information from Wikipedia, and Wikipedia editors
will seize the obvious tide in the affairs of men by choosing to become
open-source AI developers.
AI Minds born of Wikipedia will devour Wikipedia.
Wikipedia may turn out to be the alpha and the omega of AI.
In the beginning, Wikipedia serves to educate the masses of
untrained and unskilled wannabe AI developers. In the process,
Wikipedia editors who dabble in AI will create a machine
intelligence capable of understanding the content of Wikipedia.
Since March 8, 2007, there has been on SourceForge a project at
http://sourceforge.net/projects/dbpedia for "querying
Wikipedia like a database" and
http://dbpedia.org explains that
"DBpedia is a community effort to extract structured information from Wikipedia
and to make this information available on the Web. DBpedia allows you to ask
sophisticated queries against Wikipedia and to link other datasets on the
Web to Wikipedia data."
Eye has not seen, and ear has not heard, of the spectacular and
mind-bending uses to which Wikipedia and its derivative endeavors
will be put in the course of the approaching
Technological Singularity.
Resources are stretched so thin that everyone must act independently.
The editoriat of Wikipedia is the target audience for this appeal
to those who are not satisfied with merely describing the state
of the art in AI but who burn with ambition to advance the state
of the art by learning from Wikipedia how to create AI Minds
that will turn around and themselves learn from Wikipedia
how to create even more intelligent AI Minds in a spiral of
adaptive self-enhancing run-away breakthrough Superintelligence.