Ben Goertzel: AI researcher who popularized the term AGI, founder of SingularityNET, designer of the OpenCog framework, and former chief scientist at Hanson Robotics (creators of the Sophia robot).
What this episode covers
Ben Goertzel traces his lifelong obsession with artificial general intelligence from childhood Star Trek and science-fiction inspirations through his mathematics career to his current AGI projects. He explains the OpenCog cognitive architecture built on a weighted labeled hypergraph, why deep neural nets alone will never reach AGI, and how SingularityNET aims to create a decentralized, blockchain-based network of cooperating AIs. He discusses Sophia the robot as a 'walking skeleton' for embedding human values into AI, defends its theatrical illusion against critics like Yann LeCun, and applies AI to COVID and longevity research. He closes with a transhumanist vision of abolishing involuntary death and pain, naming joy, growth, and choice as life's core values.
Also referenced (named, not recommended)
Star Trek (original TV series)
Gene Roddenberry
“wasn't a book but the original Star Trek TV show which my dad watched with me like in its first run”— Ben Goertzel
Solaris
Stanislaw Lem
“it would have been H Stanis LM the the Polish writer yeah Solaris and then he had a bunch of more obscure writings”— Ben Goertzel
Godel, Escher, Bach
Douglas Hofstadter
“I discovered Douglas Hoffer's book gordal shabbach and that was sort of to the same point of AI and Paradox and logic”— Ben Goertzel
The Prometheus Project
Gerald Feinberg
“Gerald fbom who was a physicist at Princeton and that was the Prometheus project and this book was written in the late 1960s”— Ben Goertzel
The Phenomenon of Science
Valentin Turchin
“he had a book in the late 60s in Russia which was the phenomenon of science which laid out all these same things as well”— Ben Goertzel
Universal AI
Marcus Hutter
“Marcus Hooter who at that time hadn't yet published his book Universal AI which sort of gives a mathematical foundation for artificial general intelligence”— Ben Goertzel
The Will to Power
Friedrich Nietzsche
“if you look in like the third part of the collection that's been titled the will to power in book three there's very deep analysis of thinking processes”— Ben Goertzel
IBM Watson
IBM
“it pushes you towards uh IBM Watson situation where you basically have to do heuristic and hardcode stuff and Rule based stuff”— Ben Goertzel
Big reveals from this episode
- Goertzel argues a benevolent AGI solves all other problems because it can rapidly become massively smarter than humans.
- He recounts originating and 'launching the term AGI upon the world' while editing a book, without ever loving the term.
- He flatly says GPT-3 understands nothing: 'he's a complete idiot but brilliant idiot.'
- He claims current deep neural net architectures will never get anywhere near AGI.
- He reveals Hanson Robotics deliberately keeps people in Sophia's illusion because telling them how it works doesn't change their belief.
- He describes a teleoperated Philip K. Dick robot experiment where people still believed 'the spirit of Phil' was animating it.
- He states death is simply bad and his goal is to abolish 'the plague of involuntary death.'
- He envisions making multiple copies of himself, including one that fuses with superhuman AGI and one kept human.
Worth remembering
- His friend Hugo de Garis proposed SIPI: that super-intelligences shrink to subatomic scale, so quantum randomness may be their thoughts.
- Goertzel named his child 'Qorxi' (Quantum Organized Reward eXpanding Intelligence), beating Elon Musk to a strange baby name.
- Shane Legg, co-founder of DeepMind, got 'his head full of AGI' working at Goertzel's company Webmind in New Zealand.
- New Zealand AI grant funding went toward predicting the menstrual cycles of cows rather than military uses.
- Goertzel notes Vladimir Putin and corporate CEOs now invoke AGI, a term once reserved for 'crazed Mavericks.'
- He holds 'extraordinary negative respect for Ayn Rand,' having kept long-lived fruit flies at an Ayn Rand elementary school.
- He ran an experiment having Sophia's chatbot and Facebook's Transformer chatbot converse for weeks to generate training data.
- He warns 23andMe licensed its pooled DNA database exclusively to GlaxoSmithKline.
- Goertzel describes himself as a panpsychist who views even a light bulb or quark as having consciousness.
- He ends with his own words: 'our language for describing emotions is very crude, that's what music is for.'