AGI-World

Since the Singularity Summit 2007, discussion of Novamente, AGI and virtual worlds has percolated rapidly through the media and blogosphere. The following are seven blog posts… including excerpts.
With excellent documentation and photos, Tish Shute (UgoTrade founder) covers much ground in her 3,877 word post, including interview w/ Novamente’s Ben Goertzel during his visit w/ friend and advisor, Prof. Hugo de Garis, in China:

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.

Lisa Galarneau’s Terranova Blog,
The Singularity, Virtual Worlds and AI Babies:

The new wave of AI has moved far beyond simplistic and narrow AI with specialized functions to a desire to build artificial general intelligences (AGIs) that are capable of thinking and learning. The key to this desire is that practical learning is a product of experience. AGIs cannot be built, they must be grown. And the perfect place to grow them just might be virtual worlds - AI babies that can be raised by virtual villages. Ben Goertzel (who will be speaking atVirtual Worlds 2007 and whose kids are named Zarathustra, Zebulon and Scheherazade) is running a 15-person company called Novamente that is conceiving such babies for MMOs. One thing I wonder is what people can learn from helping baby AIs learn? And what kinds of attachments might we develop to these children we help raise? (People are apparently making clothes for their roombas - they’d go nuts with AI babies. And what are the hacking possibilities? Whewee!!). Lots of questions here… does this sort of interaction from infanthood guarantee friendly AI, or does it increase the possibilities for contention?

Ron Bailey’s Epistemophobia Blog,
We’d Make Great Pets:

Novamente’s Ben Goertzel is working to create self-improving AI avatars and let them loose in virtual worlds like Second Life. They could be virtual babies or pets that the denizens of Second Life would want to play with and teach. They would have virtual bodies and senses that enable them to explore their worlds and to become socialized. However, unlike real babies, these AI babies have an unlimited capacity for boosting their level of intelligence.

Tracy A Sheradan’s The Long Blonde Tail Blog,
Ben Goertzel: The Singularity is Closer Than You Think:

I had the extreme pleasure of meeting Dr. Ben Goertzel the evening before his presentation at this year’s Singularity Summit. Interestingly, he has a slightly different interpretation to his counterparts as to when the Singularity will come about… Most AI experts believe it is 20-40 years away. Says Ben:”Common wisdom holds that powerful artificial general intelligence (AGI) is decades to centuries off. Even techno-futurist Ray Kurzweil projects a date of 2029 for human-level AI via human brain emulation. My contention, however, is that powerful and beneficial AGI could come much sooner - if sufficient attention and resources are devoted to the right approaches.

Of course, it is difficult to place any kind o reliable estimate on the course of development of this kind of technology, given the R&D that remains to be done, and the uncertainties regarding funding and other practical exigencies. But radical success within less than a decade does not seem an outrageously unlikely possibility, in the view of one AGI researcher and entrepreneur.”

David Orban’s Blog,
Liveblogging the Singularity Summit 2007:

Ben Goertzel of Novamente and the Singularity Institute has a new title for his speech which is “Nine years to AGI”, since a year ago he gave a speech which was entitled “Ten years to AGI”. “Human babies are the stupidest things, but we have to start there. The robotic approach is good, but you will loose all of your time with actuators, and servo motors. We settled on robots in virtual worlds. Novamente is initiating an open source AGI called OpenCOG, and will present virtual pets at the Virtual Worlds Conference in San Jose in October.

Ming Kwan’s Wikinomics Blog,
A safe haven for AI testing:

The idea of using the virtual world to develop AI technology is actually quite brilliant. Since, much of the time, AI tends to have a negative stigma, propagated by the media and movies. People don’t want something out of Will Smith’s ‘I, Robot‘ or Keanu Reeves’ ‘Matrix’ to happen in their lifetime. Even Disney’s ‘Meet the Robinson’s’ exhibited the perils of AI (and the list goes on). No one wants their former house cleaning ‘bot chasing them down trying to kill them… or their PCs and inventions trying to take over the world - for those of you who haven’t seen these movies.Having avatars with AI in the virtual world sits better with people than experimenting in the real world with a real robot for various reasons, one of which is listed above. Paranoia aside, the virtual world will also serve as a more accepting marketplace for this type of technology, and as Dr. Goertzel says, “it’s a lot more practical to control virtual robots in simulated worlds than real robots”.

Richard Leis, Jr.’s Frontier Channel Blog
Speaker: Dr. Ben Goertzel:

Goertzel defined AGI as “the ability to achieve complex goals in complex environments using limited computational resources.” AGI will require autonomy, practical understanding of self and others, and understanding “what the problem is” opposed to just rote problem solving.

[photos by urbanpeacock of James Hughes at Summit]

[photo by david.orban of Ben Goertzel at Summit]