artificial general intelligence & the technological singularity
Ben will be speaking at upcoming AI Meetup
What: Ben Goertzel, Novamente LLC
When: Sunday September 7, 2008 12:00 Noon
Where: TechShop - 120 Independence Dr. Menlo Park, CA 94025
More: http://ai.meetup.com/94/calendar/8644333
Meetup Description: We canceled our AI meetups scheduled for Aug. 31 and Sept 14. Fortunately for us, Dr. Ben Goertzel from Novament will be in the area and [...]
While at IDF in San Francisco (Aug-08), I had the pleasure of watching, from the front row no less, Intel’s CTO, Justin Rattner explain+support Ray Kurzweil’s concept of the technological singularity. This is big. Now, more and more high level executives will come out in support w/o fear of loosing their jobs.
Intel’s chief technology [...]
VentureBeat’s Dan Kaplan reviewed Novamente from an informed perspective:
Nintendogs for the DS was a brilliant game. Its premise — pick a puppy and nurture it to adulthood — played on the digital pet theme that has driven high sales from Tamagotchi to Pikachu, and let you teach your dogs fancy tricks and skills that would [...]
spectrum.ieee.org/singularity
google.com/search?hl=en&q=IEEE+Spectrum+singularity
Here’s a good, recent video, including Ray Kurzweil:
With great support from the Accelerating Future People Database, we’re in the process of uploading AGI-08 talks. Thus far, Ben Goertzel’s introductory talk - AI and AGI: Past, Present and Future - has been uploaded, along with a few other.
Last week, Goertzel’s startup company Novamente LLC announced their collaboration with Electric Sheep Company to bring artificial intelligence agents to online virtual worlds (see BBC News Coverage). So things are definitely beginning to ramp up. Novamente and Electric Sheep will show off their plans for AI in virtual worlds at the Virtual Worlds Fall Conference and Expo 2007, Oct 10th - 11th, San Jose, CA.Goertzel explained to me some of the reasons virtual worlds such as Second Life have the potential to form very interesting environments for the development of AGI. Most importantly in online virtual worlds, if you roll out virtual babies or pets you also get a huge mass of people to teach them things. You get the opportunity to harness the wisdom of crowds. Many MMOG games have AI in them but games are narrow, not requiring much flexibility or adaptiveness on the part of the AI agents operating in them. The openness of virtual worlds creates many new possibilities for AGI. Also artificial intelligence can be embedded in a variety of embodied agents at a low cost.
SIAI’s Director of Partnerships, Jonas Lamis, responded to Wall Street Journal’s Lee Gomes’ negative review of the Singularity Summit 2007 (where SIAI / Novamente’s Ben Goertzel presented). In line with Lamis’ response, entrepreneur, futurust and documentary filmmaker, Michael E. Arth, chastised WSJ with the following:
Letter to the Wall Street Journal
Editor,
I must have been at [...]
The proceedings (edited by Ben Grtzel and Pei Wang) from our 2006 AGI Workshop (sponsored by Novamente) has been published. You can purchase the book or check for the individual papers at the website. Here’s an excerpt from the introduction:
This book contains materials that come out of the Artificial General Intelligence Research Institute (AGIRI) Workshop, [...]
Ben Goertzel (Novamente CEO) explains the Singularity Institute’s AGI R&D Program in this 17 minute video recorded on July 22, 2007 in San Francisco. More Goertzel and Novamente videos can be found here.