Hi all –

Ben Goertzel here, with some minor news: I have recently written two articles for kurzweilai.net, and the first one has just appeared!

It’s called “ARTIFICIAL GENERAL INTELLIGENCE: NOW IS THE TIME”, and can be viewed at

http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0701.html

It touches a bit on Novamente, and long-term applications thereof (artificial scientists, digital twins and such) but is mainly pretty general and high-level.

The second article focuses more specifically on the Novamente approach to AGI and should appear on kurzweilai.net fairly soon.

The theme of the first article may be inferred from the title: I make a case, familiar in essence to those who know me, that AGI at the human level or beyond could be achieved in a relatively brief period of time (say, 5-7 years … possibly less) with a serious, intensive, concerted effort by the right people.

Needless to add, this is one of the guiding aspirations of Novamente LLC. We aim to create progressively more and more powerful AGI that controls embodied agents in simulation worlds. In this way we will create AGIs that are not only extremely intelligent but have grown up in (online) human societies and learned how to think, act and be themselves via interacting with huumans.

We at Novamente are going as fast as we can toward powerful AGI. One point I make in my kurzweilai.net article is that progress could be even faster with a Manhattan Project type effort. However, assuming our progress continues to accelerate as it has been, we will get there even without that kind of large-scale support. We have a solid AGI design, a team competent to implement it, and a nifty plan for monetizing it. So: onward!

And, of course the Manhattan Project style approach would have its risks too. As AGI systems grow ever smarter, AGI ethics will become a major issue; and Novamente LLC’s concern for this issue is indicated by the fact that I and Novamente’s President Bruce Klein have become involved in SIAI, an organization devoted to AGI ethics (as Bruce discussed in his recent blog post here).

Ben Goertzel
CEO and Chief Scientist
Novamente LLC

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 11th, 2007 at 10:54 pm and is filed under Novamente update. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.