OpenCog

Here's a video in which Ben Goertzel talks about the OpenCog system. This is a project which I've been keeping an eye on for the last few years, although so far I havn't gone into the details of its use at anything other than an overview level.

I should say at the outset that I'm not entirely on board with the Singularity idea - a more detailed excoriation of which could be a topic for another time - but thankfully this presentation doesn't get bogged down with such meanderings.

The thing I like about Goertzel is that he seems to be a practitioner.  His ideas are somewhat interesting and laid out in some detail in his various writings, such as The Hidden Pattern.  Roughly half way through this talk he gives what is probably the clearest and most amusing explanation of the MOSES algorithm which I've yet heard.

There are quite a few points on which I'd agree with him, such as that not all behavior is goal-oriented (often systems are merely interacting, of "dancing", under dynamics whose attractors may not reside within the agents themselves), that continuous self-modeling will be very important for intelligent systems (for example, detecting damage and devising compensatory strategies, or maintaining an ongoing narrative about the self) and also the economic attention allocation (or attention as a commodity) idea does make some sense.  All complex machines, be they biological or otherwise, have finite energy and material resources, and the problem of intelligence can be framed as one of juggling these so as to continue functioning and thriving in whatever environment you happen to occupy.

Although Ben Goertzel is not primarily a roboticist he has done some amount of robotics related work with OpenCog in recent times, using the Nao robot.  Towards the end of the talk he laments upon how difficult and contrived this often is, and I think that this is because a gap still remains between the sorts of abstractions which can be produced from sensor data using systems such as OpenCV or PCL and the higher level probabilistic reasoning which systems like OpenCog can facilitate.  It's still difficult to seamlessly ground high level concepts, or to have such concepts emerge ultimately from sensor data.

However, I think there's good cause to believe that what is sometimes referred to as "cognitive robotics" may really become possible in the years ahead.  If you can have a robot drive around and construct a model of its environment using some variety of 3D SLAM, then segment the model to extract objects such as tables, chairs and doorways then this could become the basis for the formation of intelligent goal-oriented executive planning, and it's at that sort of level where I think that systems such as OpenCog could be genuinely useful and lead to new innovations.

As far as I'm aware there is currently no ROS node to interface with the OpenCog system, so that's a project which someone might wish to take on in future.