Ben Goertzel

Cassio Pennachin

“Only a small community has concentratedon general intelligence. No one has tried to make a thinking machine . . . The bottom line is that we really haven’t progressed too far toward a truly intelligent machine. We have collections of dumb specialists in small domains; the true majesty of general intelligence still awaits our attack. . . . We have got to get back to the deepest questions of AI and general intelligence. . . ” –MarvinMinsky as interviewed in Hal’s Legacy, edited by David Stork, 2000. Our goal in creating this edited volume has been to ?ll an apparent gap in the scienti?c literature, by providing a coherent presentation of a body of contemporary research that, in spite of its integral importance, has hitherto kept a very low pro?le within the scienti?c and intellectual community. This body of work has not been given a name before; in this book we christen it “Arti?cial General Intelligence” (AGI). What distinguishes AGI work from run-of-the-mill “arti?cial intelligence” research is that it is explicitly focused on engineering general intelligence in the short term. We have been active researchers in the AGI ?eld for many years, and it has been a pleasure to gather together papers from our colleagues working on related ideas from their own perspectives. In the Introduction we give a conceptual overview of the AGI ?eld, and also summarize and interrelate the key ideas of the papers in the subsequent chapters.

Artificial General Intelligence

The Hidden Pattern presents a novel philosophy of mind, intended to form a coherent conceptual framework within which it is possible to understand the diverse aspects of mind and intelligence in a unified way. The central concept of the philosophy presented is the concept of "pattern": minds and the world they live in and co-create are viewed as patterned systems of patterns, evolving over time, and various aspects of subjective experience and individual and social intelligence are analyzed in detail in this light. Many of the ideas presented are motivated by recent research in artificial intelligence and cognitive science, and the author's own AI research is discussed in moderate detail in one chapter. However, the scope of the book is broader than this, incorporating insights from sources as diverse as Vedantic philosophy, psychedelic psychotherapy, Nietzschean and Peircean metaphysics and quantum theory. One of the unique aspects of the patternist approach is the way it seamlessly fuses the mechanistic, engineering-oriented approach to intelligence and the introspective, experiential approach to intelligence.

A Patternist Philosophy of Mind

The Hidden Pattern

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is the quest for the sci-fi AI dream: AI with mental autonomy, generality, adaptiveness and imagination equal to and ultimately exceeding that of humans. After decades of R&D struggles, the time for AGI is now finally near. Since the early aughts, Dr. Ben Goertzel has been the leading force advancing the concept of AGI in the research community and the public sphere. Here he gives an insider's account of the rise of AI and AGI from relative obscurity to their current status as the focus of large corporate and government initiatives. He presents his understanding of the operation of the human brain, and the viability of various approaches to AGI including his own OpenCog AGI project; and also describes his efforts to use AI to solve critical issues such as human aging. In Goertzel's vision, AGI will soon yield dramatic changes in every area of human life and society. Advanced AGIs that vastly exceed human intelligence will bring on a Technological Singularity, quite likely within our lifetimes.

An Inside View of the Rise of Artificial General Intelligence

Agi Revolution

Ray Kurzweil has projected the date for a Technological Singularity as 2045. AI researcher Ben Goertzel believes it could potentially happen much sooner, if appropriate attention and resources are focused on the right R&D projects. What current technologies are most likely to lead to the rapid advent of powerful Artificial General Intelligence systems? What impact will the advent of such technologies have upon human life? What philosophical, scientific and spiritual ideas should be deployed to explore such questions? How probable are Terminator type outcomes, versus friendlier scenarios where advanced artificial intelligences play a beneficent role to humanity and other sentiences? What should be our top priorities now, looking forward to a radically different AI-centric future? This book gathers together essays that Ben Goertzel wrote during the period 2009-2011, for H+ Magazine and other periodicals, which explore these issues from various directions. Each essay is presented along with a brief personal introduction discussing the context in which the essay was written, and reviewing relevant developments from the period 2012-2014.

... and Other Essays on Agi and Its Implications

Ten Years to the Singularity If We Really Really Try

Wild Computing, Distributed Digital Consciousness, and the Emerging Global Brain (IFSR International Series on Systems Science and Engineering)

Creating Internet Intelligence

This is the first work to apply complex systems science to the psychological interplay of order and chaos. The author draws on thought from a wide range of disciplines-both conventional and unorthodox-to address such questions as the nature of consciousness, the relation between mind and reality, and the justification of belief systems. The material should provoke thought among systems scientists, theoretical psychologists, artificial intelligence researchers, and philosophers.

Language, Thought, and Reality from the Perspective of Complex Systems Science

Chaotic Logic

A deep, diverse edited volume addressing the most critical issues regarding the future of humanity and intelligence -- with chapters authored by a who's-who of leading futurist thinkers and doers. According to Vernor Vinge, Ray Kurzweil and a rapidly increasing chorus of techno-futurists, we are living on the brink of a technological Singularity - a time when machines will become vastly more intelligent than humans. In such a scenario, death, disease and everyday material scarcity will be radically diminished, and life will be dramatically different in many other ways. But what will the path to this amazing future look like? How will human life grow and unfold as technology advances and Singularity approaches? The chapters in this book approach this issue from the perspectives of multiple visionary authors from around the globe, covering topics such as the impact of life extension, the future of money and exchange, the future of human psychology, biological self-modification, intelligence enhancement, automation and escalating unemployment, the possibility of global war between pro and anti technology forces, the impact of future technology on Asia and Africa, the emerging Global Brain, the future of surveillance and privacy, and much more. There are no easy or definite answers here - but lots of fascinating questions to explore. CONTENTS Chapter One: Predicting the Age of Post-Human Intelligences, by Ted Goertzel and Ben Goertzel Chapter Two: A Tale of Two Transitions, by Robin Hanson Chapter Three: Longer Lives on the Brink of Global Population Contraction: A Report from 2040, by Max More Chapter Four: Implanting Post-Human Intelligence in Human Bodies, by John Hewitt Chapter Five: The Singularity and the Methuselarity: Similarities and Differences, by Aubrey de Grey Chapter Six: Robotics and AI: Impacts Felt on Every Aspect of Our Future World, by Daryl Nazareth Chapter Seven: Robotics, AI, the Luddite Fallacy and the Future of the Job Market, by Wayne Radinsky Chapter Eight: Moral Responsibility and Autonomous Machines, by David Burke Chapter Nine: How Will the Artilect War Start?, by Hugo de Garis Chapter Ten: Return to Eden? Promises and Perils on the Road to Global Superintelligence, by Francis Heylighen Chapter Eleven: Distributing Cognition: From Local Brains to the Global Brain, by Clément Vidal Chapter Twelve: A World of Views: A World of Interacting Post-human Intelligences, by Viktoras Veitas and David Weinbaum (Weaver) Chapter Thirteen: Chinese Perspectives on the Approach to the Singularity, by Mingyu Huang Chapter Fourteen: Africa Today and the Shadow of the Coming Singularity, by Hruy Tsegaye Chapter Fifteen: The World's First Decentralized System for Financial and Legal Transaction, by Chris Odom Chapter Sixteen: Beyond Money: Offer Networks, a Potential Infrastructure for a Post-Money Economy, by Ben Goertzel Chapter Seventeen: Sousveillance and AGI, by Ben Goertzel and Stephan Vladimir Bugaj Chapter Eighteen: The Future of Human Nature, by Ben Goertzel Chapter Nineteen: Capitalism, Socialism, Singularitarianism, by Ted Goertzel Chapter Twenty: Toward a Human-Friendly Post-Singularity World, by Ben Goertzel Chapter Twenty-one: Looking Backward from 2100, by Ben Goertzel and Ted Goertzel

Life, Society and Economy on the Brink of the Singularity

The End of the Beginning

The term Cosmism was introduced by Tsiolokovsky and other Russian Cosmists around 1900. Goertzel's "Cosmist Manifesto" gives it new life and a new twist for the 21st century. Cosmism, as Goertzel presents it, is a practical philosophy for the posthuman era. Rooted in Western and Eastern philosophy as well as modern technology and science, it is a way of understanding ourselves and our universe that makes sense now, and will keep on making sense as advanced technology exerts its transformative impact as the future unfolds. Among the many topics considered are AI, nanotechnology, uploading, immortality, psychedelics, meditation, future social structures, psi phenomena, alien and cetacean intelligence and the Singularity. The Cosmist perspective is shown to make plain old common sense of even the wildest future possibilities.

Practical Philosophy for the Posthuman Age

A Cosmist Manifesto

Ted G. Goertzel

life, society and economy on the brink of the singularity

The end of the beginning

0. 0 Psychology versus Complex Systems Science Over the last century, psychology has become much less of an art and much more of a science. Philosophical speculation is out; data collection is in. In many ways this has been a very positive trend. Cognitive science (Mandler, 1985) has given us scientific analyses of a variety of intelligent behaviors: short-term memory, language processing, vision processing, etc. And thanks to molecular psychology (Franklin, 1985), we now have a rudimentary understanding of the chemical processes underlying personality and mental illness. However, there is a growing feeling-particularly among non-psychologists (see e. g. Sommerhoff, 1990) - that, with the new emphasis on data collection, something important has been lost. Very little attention is paid to the question of how it all fits together. The early psychologists, and the classical philosophers of mind, were concerned with the general nature of mentality as much as with the mechanisms underlying specific phenomena. But the new, scientific psychology has made disappointingly little progress toward the resolution of these more general questions. One way to deal with this complaint is to dismiss the questions themselves. After all, one might argue, a scientific psychology cannot be expected to deal with fuzzy philosophical questions that probably have little empirical signifi cance. It is interesting that behaviorists and cognitive scientists tend to be in agreement regarding the question of the overall structure of the mind.

A New Mathematical Theory of Mind

The Structure of Intelligence

Stephan Vladimir Bugaj

Describing the near future technologies and scientific changes that will affect human life in the next 25 years, this book covers key topics in artificial intelligence, as well as looking at computing and biotechnology.

21st Century Technology and Its Radical Implications for Mind, Society and Reality

The Path to Posthumanity

Cybernetic pioneer Warren McCullough asked: "What is a man, that he may know a number; and what is a number, that a man may know it?" Thinking along much the same lines, my question here is: "What is a creative mind, that it might emerge from a complex system; and what is a complex system, that it might give rise to a creative mind?" Complexity science is a fashionable topic these days. My perspective on complexity, however, is a somewhat unusual one: I am interested in complex systems science principally as it reflects on abstract mathematical, computational models of mind. In my three previous books, The Structure of Intelligence, Evolving Mind, and Chaotic Logic, I have outlined a comprehensive complex-systems-theoretic theory of mind that I now call the psynet model. This book is a continuation of the research program presented in my previous books (and those books will be frequently referred to here, by the nicknames EM and CL). One might summarize the trajectory of thought spanning these four books as follows. SI formulated a philosophy and mathem- ics of mind, based on theoretical computer science and the concept of "pattern. " EM analyzed the theory of evolution by natural selection in similar terms, and used this computational theory of evolution to establish the evolutionary nature of thought.

Explorations in Evolutionary, Autopoietic, and Cognitive Dynamics

From Complexity to Creativity

Zhongzhi Shi

Jiali Feng

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Intelligence Science, ICIS 2017, held in Shanghai, China, in October 2017. The 38 full papers and 9 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 82 submissions. They deal with key issues in intelligence science and have been organized in the following topical sections: theory of intelligence science; cognitive computing; big data analysis and machine learning; machine perception; intelligent information processing; and intelligent applications.

Second IFIP TC 12 International Conference, ICIS 2017, Shanghai, China, October 25-28, 2017, Proceedings

Intelligence Science I

Pei Wang

This book is a collection of writings by active researchers in the field of Artificial General Intelligence, on topics of central importance in the field. Each chapter focuses on one theoretical problem, proposes a novel solution, and is written in sufficiently non-technical language to be understandable by advanced undergraduates or scientists in allied fields. This book is the very first collection in the field of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) focusing on theoretical, conceptual, and philosophical issues in the creation of thinking machines. All the authors are researchers actively developing AGI projects, thus distinguishing the book from much of the theoretical cognitive science and AI literature, which is generally quite divorced from practical AGI system building issues. And the discussions are presented in a way that makes the problems and proposed solutions understandable to a wide readership of non-specialists, providing a distinction from the journal and conference-proceedings literature. The book will benefit AGI researchers and students by giving them a solid orientation in the conceptual foundations of the field (which is not currently available anywhere); and it would benefit researchers in allied fields by giving them a high-level view of the current state of thinking in the AGI field. Furthermore, by addressing key topics in the field in a coherent way, the collection as a whole may play an important role in guiding future research in both theoretical and practical AGI, and in linking AGI research with work in allied disciplines

Theoretical Foundations of Artificial General Intelligence

Alexey Potapov

Tom Everitt

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Artificial General Intelligence, AGI 2017, held in Melbourne, VIC, Australia, in August 2017. The 24 regular papers presented in this book together with 1 short paper were carefully reviewed and selected from 35 submissions. They cover topics such as architectures; mathematical foundations; algorithms; safety; understanding; human cognition; and philosophy.

10th International Conference, AGI 2017, Melbourne, VIC, Australia, August 15-18, 2017, Proceedings

Nil Geisweiller

The work outlines a novel conceptual and theoretical framework for understanding Artificial General Intelligence and based on this framework outlines a practical roadmap for the development of AGI with capability at the human level and ultimately beyond.

A Path to Advanced AGI via Embodied Learning and Cognitive Synergy

Engineering General Intelligence, Part 1

Laurent Orseau

Javier Snaider

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Artificial General Intelligence, AGI 2014, held in Quebec City, QC, Canada, in August 2014. The 22 papers and 8 posters were carefully reviewed and selected from 65 submissions. Researchers have recognized the necessity of returning to the original goals of the field by treating intelligence as a whole. Increasingly, there is a call for a transition back to confronting the more difficult issues of "human-level intelligence" and more broadly artificial general intelligence. AGI research differs from the ordinary AI research by stressing on the versatility and wholeness of intelligence and by carrying out the engineering practice according to an outline of a system comparable to the human mind in a certain sense. The AGI conference series has played and continues to play, a significant role in this resurgence of research on artificial intelligence in the deeper, original sense of the term of "artificial intelligence". The conferences encourage interdisciplinary research based on different understandings of intelligence and exploring different approaches.

7th International Conference, AGI 2014, Quebec City, QC, Canada, August 1-4, 2014, Proceedings

Jordi Bieger

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Artificial General Intelligence, AGI 2015, held in Berlin, Germany in July 2015. The 41 papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 72 submissions. The AGI conference series has played and continues to play, a significant role in this resurgence of research on artificial intelligence in the deeper, original sense of the term of “artificial intelligence”. The conferences encourage interdisciplinary research based on different understandings of intelligence and exploring different approaches. AGI research differs from the ordinary AI research by stressing on the versatility and wholeness of intelligence and by carrying out the engineering practice according to an outline of a system comparable to the human mind in a certain sense.

Ben Goertzel

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