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.
Related Links
- Ben Goertzel's Machines Like Us interview
- Ben Goertzel's Homepage
- Novamente LLC
- Ben Goertzel's Blog
- Artificial General Intelligence: Now is the Time, by Ben Goertzel
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.
