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Ben Goertzel As the Singularity Institute's Director of Research, Ben Goertzel, Ph.D., is responsible for overseeing the direction of the Institute's research division. He has contributed over 70 publications, concentrating on cognitive science and AI, including Chaotic Logic, Creating Internet Intelligence, Artificial General Intelligence (edited with Cassio Pennachin), and Hidden Pattern. He is chief science officer and acting CEO of Novamente, a software company aimed at creating applications in the area of natural language question-answering. He also oversees Biomind, an AI and bioinformatics firm that licenses software for bioinformatics data analysis to the NIH's National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases and CDC. Previously, he was founder and CTO of Webmind, a 120+ employee thinking-machine company. He has a Ph.D. in mathematics from Temple University, and has held several university positions in mathematics, computer science, and psychology, in the US, New Zealand, and Australia.
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Goertzel's Machines Like Us interview
Ben Goertzel Quotes If we're going to achieve general artificial intelligence, we're going to have to work on artificial general intelligence. I believe that I have arrived at a detailed software design that is capable of giving rise to intelligence at the human level and beyond. If this is correct, it means that the possibility is there to achieve Singularity faster than even Kurzweil and his ilk predict. Furthermore, having arrived at one software design that appears Singularity-capable, I have become confident there are many others as well. There may be other researchers besides me, actively working on projects with the capability of achieving massive levels of intelligence. Let's take what we know about the brain and use it, but let's not wait for the darned neuroscientists to finish their mapping of the brain. We're really not trying to build a human brain anyway, we're trying to build a highly powerful intelligence! Let's take what we know about the brain, what we know about complex problem-solving algorithms from writing them to solve various real-world problems, what we know about how the mind works from psychology and philosophy…and let's put all the pieces together, to make a new kind of digital mind. I strongly suspect the interplay between specialization and generality in the human brain is subtler than is commonly recognized. The brain certainly has some kick-ass specialized tools, such as its face recognition algorithms. But these are not the essence of its intelligence. Some of the brain's weaker tools, such as its very sloppy algorithms for reasoning under uncertainty, are actually more critical to its general intelligence, as they have subtler and more thoroughgoing synergies with other tools that help give rise to important emergent structures/dynamics. In my view, if the US government created an "AI Manhattan Project" – run without a progress-obstructing bureaucracy, and based on gathering together an interdisciplinary team of the greatest AI minds on the planet – then we would have a human-level AI within 5 years. Almost guaranteed, assuming Novamente or some other viable design were adopted. It is a big project, but not nearly as big as building, say, Windows Vista. There is plenty of room for debate about the statistics of accelerating change: clearly some things are advancing way faster than others. Computer chips and brain scanners are advancing more rapidly than forks or refrigerators. In this regard, I think, the key question is whether Singularity-enabling technologies are advancing exponentially (and I think enough of them are to make a critical difference). But that's not the point I want to get at here. The point I want to make is: I think it is important to distinguish technological acceleration from subjective acceleration. … Because of these two points, a very high rate of technological acceleration may not lead to a comparably high rate of subjective acceleration. Which is, I think, the situation we are seeing at present. There is no good reason to believe that the emergence of the modern human mind is the end state of the evolution of psyche. Indeed, the rub is this: While evolution might take millions of years to generate another psychological sea change as dramatic as the emergence of modern humanity, technology may do the job much more expediently. The Singularity can be expected to induce rapid and dramatic change in the nature of life, mind and experience. It does not seem at all strange to me to partially rely on the advice of an appropriate group of others, when making an important decision. It seems unwise to me not to. What happens when the system revises itself over and over again, improving its intelligence until we can no longer control or understand it? Will it retain the values it has begun with? Realistically, this is anybody’s guess! My own guess is that the Easy values are more likely to be retained through successive drastic self-modifications – but the Hard values do have at least a prayer of survival, if they’re embedded in a robust value dual network with appropriate basic values at the top. Only time will tell.
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