The Road to Singularity: Ben Goertzel on AGI and The Fate of Humanity
The Michael Shermer Show
Michael Shermer
4.3 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 1 September 2024
⏱️ 146 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Dr. Ben Goertzel is a multidisciplinary scientist, entrepreneur, and author, originally from Brazil. He currently resides on an island near Seattle after living in Hong Kong. He leads prominent AI organizations like the SingularityNET Foundation, OpenCog Foundation, and the AGI Society, which hosts an annual Artificial General Intelligence conference. Goertzel is also deeply involved in AI development through organizations like Rejuve, Mindplex, and Cogito, and serves as a musician in Jam Galaxy Band, the first-ever band led by a humanoid robot. Additionally, he played a key role in the creation of the Sophia robot at Hanson Robotics and now works on the development of Grace, Sophia's sister, at Awakening Health.
Goertzel's research spans fields such as artificial intelligence, cognitive science, natural language processing, and theoretical physics, resulting in over 25 scientific books and 150 technical papers. He frequently lectures at global conferences and has an extensive background in academia, having earned a PhD in mathematics from Temple University and serving on university faculties in the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand. His most recent book, The Consciousness Explosion, explores the intersection of human consciousness and the technological singularity.
Shermer and Goertzel explore various topics related to AI, including the nature of intelligence, AGI, the alignment problem, consciousness, and sentience. They consider AI dystopia, utopia, and protopia, along with ethical and legal issues, such as AI values and universal basic income (UBI). Other discussions involve mind uploading, self-driving cars, robots like Sophia, and whether AI can solve political and economic problems or even achieve consciousness.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to the Michael Sherman Show. The Michael Sherber Show Why should there be the singularity? How do you know there won't be multiple ones and how do you know we haven't already had one? |
| 0:32.0 | I mean, this is a point Terry said |
| 0:34.3 | said Zizunowski made when I recorded an episode with he's got a book coming out on |
| 0:38.8 | chat gp. And he doesn't even like the idea of the singularity as a phrase that something like this |
| 0:47.0 | you know smartphone I'm holding up here you know 50 years ago this would if you said you had this this would be well that's the |
| 0:53.9 | singularity I mean it's so massively different it's such a massive change in |
| 0:58.4 | society and life that that it's happened so maybe the singularity is already here I mean I'm not I'm not that |
| 1:09.2 | interested in the concept of singularity per se. |
| 1:14.4 | I mean, that's not what got me interested in all this anyway. |
| 1:16.8 | What got? |
| 1:18.8 | So I started my interest in these topics |
| 1:21.3 | through science fiction, including the original Star Trek. |
| 1:24.6 | Yeah, but then in the early 70s I encountered a book in our town library in southern New Jersey |
| 1:31.4 | called The Prometheus Project, which was written by the Princeton physicist |
| 1:36.0 | Gerald Feinberg. It was published in 68. And what it said was within a few decades, we'll |
| 1:42.4 | probably get machine smarter than people. |
| 1:44.8 | We'll be able to do nanoengineering at the molecular level and |
| 1:48.1 | we'll be able to conquer death and disease. |
| 1:50.8 | The question will be, what do we use this for do use it to expand consciousness or do we use it just for extending mindless rampant consumerism? |
| 2:00.0 | He thought we should put this to a Democratic vote and he proposed that the UN should |
| 2:04.3 | survey the world population to see whether these obviously impending technologies were |
| 2:09.9 | put toward consciousness expansion of rampant consumerism. |
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