Ben Goertzel is one of the most interesting minds in the artificial intelligence community. He is the founder of SingularityNET, designer of OpenCog AI framework, formerly a director of research at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, Chief Scientist of Hanson Robotics, the company that created the Sophia Robot. He has been a central figure in the AGI community for many years, including in the Conference on Artificial General Intelligence.

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EPISODE LINKS:
Ben's Twitter: https://twitter.com/bengoertzel
Ben's Website: https://goertzel.org/
AGI Conference: http://agi-conf.org/2020/
SingularityNET: https://singularitynet.io/
SingularityNET Twitter: https://twitter.com/singularity_net
OpenCog: https://opencog.org/

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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
3:20 - Books that inspired you
6:38 - Are there intelligent beings all around us?
13:13 - Dostoevsky
15:56 - Russian roots
20:19 - When did you fall in love with AI?
31:30 - Are humans good or evil?
42:04 - Colonizing mars
46:53 - Origin of the term AGI
55:56 - AGI community
1:12:36 - How to build AGI?
1:36:47 - OpenCog
2:25:32 - SingularityNET
2:49:33 - Sophia
3:16:02 - Coronavirus
3:24:14 - Decentralized mechanisms of power
3:40:16 - Life and death
3:42:44 - Would you live forever?
3:50:26 - Meaning of life
3:58:03 - Hat
3:58:46 - Question for AGI

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a conversation with Ben Goertzel, 1 of the most interesting minds in the artificial intelligence community.

He's the founder of SingularityNet, designer of OpenCog AI framework, formerly a director of research at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, and Chief Scientist of Hanson Robotics, the company that created the Sophia robot.

He has been a central figure in the AGI community for many years, including in his organizing and contributing to the Conference on Artificial General Intelligence, the 2020 version of which is actually happening this week, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.

I encourage you to check out the talks, including by Yosha Bach from episode 101 of this podcast.

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And now, here's my conversation with Ben Gretzel.

You know, what got me into AI and science fiction and such in the first place wasn't a book, but the original Star Trek TV show, which my dad watched with me like in its first run.

It would have been like 1968, 69 or something.

And that was incredible because every show they visited a different alien civilization with different culture and weird mechanisms.

But that got me into science fiction, and there wasn't that much science fiction to watch on TV at that stage.

So that got me into reading the whole literature of science fiction, you know, from the beginning of the previous century until that time.

And I mean, there was so many science fiction writers who were inspirational to me.

I'd say if I had to pick 2, it would have been Stanislaw Lem, the Polish writer.

Yeah, Solaris, and then he had a bunch of more obscure writings on superhuman AIs that were engineered.

Solaris was sort of a superhuman, naturally occurring intelligence.

Dick, who, you know, ultimately my fandom for Philip K.

Dick is 1 of the things that brought me together with David Hanson, my collaborator on robotics projects.

So, you know, Stanislas Stalin was very much an intellectual, right?

So he had a very broad view of intelligence going beyond the human and into what I would call, you know, open-ended super intelligence.

The Solaris super intelligent ocean was intelligent in some ways more generally intelligent than people, but in a complex and confusing way so that human beings could never quite connect to it, but it was still palpably very, very smart.

And then the Golem 4 supercomputer in 1 of Lem's books.

This was engineered by people, but eventually it became very intelligent in a different direction than humans and decided that humans were kind of trivial and not that interesting.

So it put some impenetrable shield around itself, shut itself off from humanity, and then issued some philosophical screed about the pathetic and hopeless nature of humanity and all human thought, and then disappeared.

His main thing was human compassion and the human heart and soul are going to be the constant that will keep us going through whatever aliens we discover or telepathy machines or super AIs or whatever it might be.

So he didn't believe in reality, like the reality that we see may be a simulation or a dream or something else we can't even comprehend, but he believed in love and compassion as something persistent through the various simulated realities.

So those 2 science fiction writers had a huge impact on me.

Then a little older than that, I got into Dostoevsky and Friedrich Nietzsche and Rimbaud and a bunch of more literary typewriting.

So on the Solaris side, Stanislav Lem, this kind of idea of there being intelligences out there that are different than our own.

Do you think there are intelligences maybe all around us that we're not able to even detect?

So this kind of idea of, maybe you can comment also on Stephen Wolfram, thinking that there's computations all around us, and we're just not smart enough to detect their intelligence, or appreciate their intelligence.

Yeah, so my friend Hugo de Garis, who I've been talking to about these things for many decades, since the early 90s.

He had an idea he called SIPI, the Search for Intra Particulate Intelligence.

So the concept there was, as AIs get smarter and smarter and smarter, assuming the laws of physics as we know them now are still what these superintelligences perceived to hold and are bound by, as they get smarter and smarter, they're gonna shrink themselves littler and littler because special relativity makes it so they can communicate between 2 spatially distant points.

So they're gonna get smaller and smaller, but then ultimately, what does that mean?

The minds of the super, super, super intelligences, they're gonna be packed into the interaction of elementary particles or quarks, or the partons inside quarks, or whatever it is.

So what we perceive as random fluctuations on the quantum or subquantum level may actually be the thoughts of the micro, micro, micro miniaturized super intelligences because there's no way we can tell random from structured, but with an algorithmic information more complex than our brains, right?

So what we think is random could be the thought processes of some really tiny super minds, and if so, there's not a damn thing we can do about it except try to upgrade our intelligences and expand our minds so that we can perceive more

But if those random fluctuations, like even if we go to quantum mechanics, if that's actually superintelligent systems, aren't we then part of the soup of super intelligence?

Aren't we just like a finger of the entirety of the body of the super intelligent system?

It could be, I mean a finger is a strange metaphor.

is also useful and is controlled with intent by the brain, whereas we may be much less than that, right?

I mean, yeah, we may be just some random epiphenomenon that they don't care about too much.

Like, think about the shape of the crowd emanating from a sports stadium or something, right?

There's some emergent shape to the crowd.

It's irrelevant to the main point of the sports event or where the people are going or what's on the minds of the people making that shape in the crowd, right?

So we may just be some semi-arbitrary higher level pattern popping out of a lower level hyper-intelligent self-organization.

Yeah, I mean, the older I've gotten, the more respect I've achieved for our fundamental ignorance.

I mean, I look at my 2 dogs, 2 beautiful little toy poodles, and they watch me sitting at the computer typing.

They just think I'm sitting there wiggling my fingers to exercise and maybe, or guarding the monitor on the desk that they have no idea that I'm communicating with other people halfway around the world, let alone creating complex algorithms running in RAM on some computer server in St.

Petersburg or something, right, Although they're right there in the room with me.

So what things are there right around us that we're just too stupid or close-minded to comprehend?

also be communicating across multiple dimensions with other beings and you're too unintelligent to understand the kind of communication mechanism they're going through.

There have been various TV shows and science fiction novels, Puzzling Cats, dolphins, mice and whatnot are actually superintelligences.

I would guess as 1 or the other quantum physics founders said, those theories are not crazy enough to be true.

The reality's probably crazier than that.

Beautiful point, so on the human side, with Philip K.

Dick and in general, where do you fall on this idea that love and just the basic spirit of human nature persists throughout these multiple realities.

Are you on the side, like, the thing that inspires you about artificial intelligence, is it the human side of somehow persisting through all of the different systems we engineer, or does AI inspire you to create something that's greater than human, that's beyond human, that's almost non-human?

I would say my motivation to create AGI comes from both of those directions, actually.

So when I first became passionate about AGI when I was, it would have been 2 or 3 years old after watching robots on Star Trek, I mean, then it was really a combination of intellectual curiosity, like can a machine really think, how would you do that?

And yeah, just ambition to create something much better than all the clearly limited and fundamentally defective humans I saw around me.

Then as I got older and got more enmeshed in the human world and got married, had children, so my parents begin to age, I started to realize, well, not only will AGI let you go far beyond the limitations of the human, but it could also stop us from dying and suffering and feeling pain and tormenting ourselves mentally.

So you can see AGI has amazing capability to do good for humans, as humans, alongside with its capability to go far, far beyond the human level.

So, I mean, both aspects are there, which makes it even more exciting and important.

So you mentioned Dostoevsky and Nietzsche.

That would probably go beyond the scope of a brief interview, certainly.

But both of those are amazing thinkers who 1 will necessarily have a complex relationship with.

So, I mean, Dostoevsky on the minus side, he's kind of a religious fanatic, and he sort of helped squash the Russian nihilist movement, which was very interesting, because what nihilism meant originally in that period of the mid-late 1800s in Russia was not taking anything fully 100% for granted.

It was really more like what we'd call Bayesianism now, where you don't want to adopt anything as a dogmatic certitude and always leave your mind open.

And how Dostoevsky parodied nihilism was a bit different.

He parodied it as people who believe absolutely nothing, so they must assign an equal probability weight to every proposition, which doesn't really work.

So on the 1 hand, I didn't really agree with Dostoevsky on his sort of religious point of view.

On the other hand, if you look at his understanding of human nature and sort of the human mind and heart and soul.

He had an amazing view of how human beings, you know, construct a world for themselves based on their own understanding and their own mental predisposition.

And I think if you look in the Brothers Karamazov in particular, the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin wrote about this as a polyphonic mode of fiction, which means it's not third person, but it's not first person from any 1 person really.

There are many different characters in the novel and each of them is sort of telling part of the story from their own point of view.

So the reality of the whole story is an intersection like synergetically of the many different characters world views And that really, it's a beautiful metaphor and even a reflection, I think, of how all of us socially create our reality.

Like, each of us sees the world in a certain way.

Each of us, in a sense, is making the world as we see it, based on our own minds and understanding, but it's polyphony, like in music, where multiple instruments are coming together to create the sound.

The ultimate reality that's created comes out of each of our subjective understandings intersecting with each other, and that was 1 of

So maybe a little bit to mention, you have a connection to Russia and the Soviet culture.

I mean, I'm not sure exactly what the nature of the connection is, but at least the spirit of your thinking

Well, my ancestry is 3 quarters Eastern European Jewish.

So, I mean, 3 of my great grandparents emigrated to New York from Lithuania and border regions of Poland, which were in and out of Poland, around the time of World War I.

And they were socialists and communists as well as Jews, mostly Menshevik, not Bolshevik, and they sort of, they fled at just the right time to the US for their own personal reasons.

And then almost all, or maybe all of my extended family that remained in Eastern Europe was killed either by Hitler's or Stalin's minions at some point.

So the branch of the family that emigrated to the US was pretty much the only 1 that survived.

the spirit of the people is in your blood still?

Like, when you look in the mirror, do you see, what do you see?

I see a bag of meat that I want to transcend by uploading into some sort of superior reality.

But very, I mean, yeah, very clearly, I mean, I'm not religious in a traditional sense, but clearly the Eastern European Jewish tradition was what I was raised in.

I mean, there was, my grandfather, Leo Zewail, was a physical chemist who worked with Langis Pauling and a bunch of the other early greats in quantum mechanics.

He was on the material science side, an experimentalist rather than a theorist.

And my father's father, Victor Goertzel, was a PhD in psychology who had the unenviable job of giving psychotherapy to the Japanese in internment camps in the US in World War II, like to counsel them why they shouldn't kill themselves, even though they'd had all their stuff taken away and been imprisoned for no good reason.

So I mean, there's a lot of Eastern European Jewishness in my background.

1 of my great uncles was, I guess, conductor of San Francisco Orchestra, so there's a lot of Mickey Salkind, bunch of music in there also.

And clearly, this culture was all about learning and understanding the world and also not quite taking yourself too seriously while you do it, right?

So I do appreciate that culture, Although the whole idea that the Jews are the chosen people of God never resonated with me too much.

of the Gerzel family, I mean just the people I've encountered just doing some research and just knowing your work through the decades, it's kind of fascinating.

My dad is a sociology professor who recently retired from Rutgers University, but that clearly, that gave me a head start in life.

I mean, my grandfather gave me all those quantum mechanics books when I was like 7 or 8 years old.

I remember going through them, and it was all the old quantum mechanics, like Rutherford atoms and stuff.

So I got to the part of wave functions, which I didn't understand, although I was a very bright kid.

And I realized he didn't quite understand it either, but at least, like he pointed me to some professor he knew at UPenn nearby who understood these things, right?

So that's an unusual opportunity for a kid to have, right?

My dad, he was programming Fortran when I was

or 11 years old on like HV3000 mainframes at Rutgers University.

So I got to do linear regression in Fortran on punch cards when I was in middle school, because he was doing, I guess, analysis of demographic and sociology data.

So yes, certainly that gave me a head start and a push towards science beyond what would have been the case with many, many different situations.

Is it maybe the sociology, psychology that you picked up from your dad?

I fell in love with AI when I was probably 3 years old when I saw a robot on Star Trek.

It was turning around in a circle going, error, error, error, error, because Spock and Kirk had tricked it into a mechanical breakdown by presenting it with a logical paradox.

And I was just like, well, this makes no sense.

It's been traveling all around the universe, but these people could trick it with a simple logical paradox.

Like what, if the human brain can get beyond that paradox, why can't this AI?

So I felt the screenwriters of Star Trek had misunderstood the nature of intelligence.

I complained to my dad about it, and he wasn't gonna say anything 1 way or the other.

But before I was born, when my dad was at Antioch College in the middle of the US, he led a protest movement called SLAM, Student League Against Mortality.

They were protesting against death wandering across the campus.

So he was into some futuristic things even back then, but whether AI could confront logical paradoxes or not, he didn't know.

But when I, 10 years after that or something, I discovered Douglas Hofstadter's book, Gordal S.

Scherbach, and that was sort of to the same point of AI and paradox and logic, right?

Because he was over and over with Gordal's incompleteness theorem, and can an AI really fully model itself reflexively, or does that lead you into some paradox?

Can the human mind truly model itself reflexively, or does that lead you into some paradox?

Can the human mind truly model itself reflexively or does that lead you into some paradox?

So I think that book, Gorda Läscher-Bach, which I think I read when it first came out, I would've been 12 years old or something.

I read it cover to cover and then re-read it.

I re-read it after that, because there was a lot of weird things with little formal systems in there that were hard for me at the time.

But that was the first book I read that gave me a feeling for AI as like a practical academic or engineering discipline that people were working in.

Because before I read Cordelius Scherbach, I was into AI from the point of view of a science fiction fan.

And I had the idea, well, it may be a long time before we can achieve immortality in superhuman AGI, so I should figure out how to build a spacecraft traveling close to the speed of light, go far away, then come back to the Earth in a million years when technology is more advanced and we can build these things.

Reading Gertilischer Bach, well, it didn't all ring true to me.

A lot of it did, but I could see there are smart people right now at various universities around me who are actually trying to work on building what I would now call AGI, although Hofstadter didn't call it that.

So really, it was when I read that book, which would have been probably middle school, that then I started to think, well, this is something that I could practically work on.

Yeah, as opposed to flying away and waiting it out, you can actually be 1 of the people that actually builds the system.

and if you think about, I mean, I was interested in what we'd now call nanotechnology and in the human immortality and time travel, all the same cool things as every other science fiction loving kid.

But AI seemed like if Hofstede was right, you just figure out the right program, sit there and type it.

Like you don't need to spin stars into weird configurations or get government approval to cut people up and fill it with their DNA or something, right?

And then of course, that can achieve anything else.

There's another book from back then which was by Feinbaum, Gerald Feinbaum, who was a physicist at Princeton.

And this book was written in the late 1960s, though I encountered it in the mid-70s.

But what this book said is in the next few decades, humanity is gonna create superhuman thinking machines, molecular nanotechnology, and human immortality.

And then the challenge we'll have is what to do with it.

Do we use it to expand human consciousness in a positive direction?

Or do we use it just to further vapid consumerism?

And what he proposed was that the UN should do a survey on this.

And the UN should send people out to every little village in remotest Africa or South America and explain to everyone what technology was going to bring the next few decades and the choice that we had about how to use it and let everyone on the whole planet vote about whether we should develop super AI nanotechnology and immortality for expanded consciousness or for rampant consumerism.

And Needless to say, that didn't quite happen.

I think this guy died in the mid-80s, so we didn't even see his ideas start to become more mainstream.

But it's interesting, many of the themes I'm engaged with now, from AGI and immortality, even to trying to democratize technology as I've been pushing forward with Singularity and my work in the blockchain world.

Many of these themes were there in Feinbaum's book in the late 60s even.

And of course, Valentin Turchin, a Russian writer and a great Russian physicist who I got to know when we both lived in New York in the late 90s and early aughts, I mean, He had a book in the late 60s in Russia, which was The Phenomenon of Science, which laid out all these same things as well.

And Val died in, I don't remember, 2004 or 5 or something of Parkinson's-ism.

So yeah, it's easy for people to lose track now of the fact that the futurist and the singularitarian advanced technology ideas that are now almost mainstream and are on TV all the time.

They're sort of new in the history of the human species.

But I mean, these were all around in fairly mature form in the middle of the last century, were written about quite articulately by fairly mainstream people who were professors at top universities.

It's just until the enabling technologies got to a certain point, then you couldn't make it real.

So, and even in the 70s, I was sort of seeing that and living through it, right?

From Star Trek to Douglas Hofstadter, things were getting very, very practical from the late 60s to the late 70s.

And the first computer I bought, you could only program with hexadecimal machine code and you had to solder it together.

And then like a few years later, there's punch cards.

And a few years later, you could get like Atari 400 and Commodore VIC-20, and you could type on the keyboard and program in higher level languages alongside the assembly language.

So these ideas have been building up a while, and I guess my generation got to feel them build up, which is different than people coming into the field Now, for whom these things have just been part of the ambiance of culture for their whole career, or even their whole life.

Well, it's fascinating to think about there being all of these ideas kind of swimming, almost with a noise all around the world, all the different generations, and then some kind of nonlinear thing happens where they percolate up and capture the imagination of the mainstream.

And that seems to be what's happening with AI now.

I mean, Nietzsche, who you mentioned, had the idea of the Superman, right?

But he didn't understand enough about technology to think you could physically engineer a Superman by piecing together molecules in a certain way.

He was a bit vague about how the Superman would appear, but he was quite deep in thinking about what the state of consciousness and the mode of cognition of a Superman would be.

He was a very astute analyst of how the human mind constructs the illusion of a self, how it constructs the illusion of free will, how it constructs values like good and evil out of its own desire to maintain and advance its own organism.

He understood a lot about how human minds work.

Then he understood a lot about how post-human minds would work.

I mean, the superman was supposed to be a mind that would basically have complete root access to its own brain and consciousness and be able to architect its own value system and inspect and fine-tune all of its own biases.

So that's a lot of powerful thinking there, which then fed in and sort of seeded all of postmodern continental philosophy and all sorts of things have been very valuable in development of culture and indirectly even of technology.

But of course, without the technology there, it was all some quite abstract thinking.

So Now we're at a time in history when a lot of these ideas can be made real, which is amazing and scary, right?

It's kind of interesting to think, what do you think Nietzsche would, if he was born a century later, or transported through time, what do you think he would say about AI?

If he's born a century later, we're transported through time.

be on like TikTok and Instagram and he would never write the great works he's written.

Maybe also Sprach Zarathustra would be a music video, right?

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Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence | Lex Fridman Podcast #103