Photo courtesy of Hugo de Garis
The first panel discussion of AGI-08 was on the subject of research methods for artificial general intelligence. Session chair Eric Baum started off by responding to presentations by panelists Jonathan Connell, Joscha Bach, Wlodzislaw Duch, and Pei Wang. Questions on the first of the conference’s presentations then were taken from the audience.
Stan Franklin and Pei Wang at AGI-08
Many problems in the field of artificial intelligence can be traced back to the confusion created by differing research goals. In his presentation at AGI-08, Pei Wang clarified and compared five typical ways to define AI. He argued that though they are all legitimate research goals, they lead the research to very different directions, and most of them have trouble giving AI a proper identity.
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Ben Goertzel, AGI-08 organizing committee member and CEO/CSO of Novamente LLC, presented “AI and AGI: Past, Present and Future” during the First Conference on Artificial General Intelligence March 1st, 2008 at the University of Memphis. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) research focuses on the original and ultimate goal of AI–to create intelligence as a whole, by exploring all available paths, including theoretical and experimental computer science, cognitive science, neuroscience, and innovative interdisciplinary methodologies.
Ben Goertzel, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Melanie Swan at the Artificial Intelligence and Society event
In everyday life, we underrate the importance of intelligence because our social environment consists only of other humans, yet it is our real trump card as a species and the foundation for everything else we do. The Bayesian statistician I. J. Good proposed that an “intelligence explosion” brought about by an artificial intelligence improving the design of its own intelligence could be expected to reshape the universe more than all human actions up to this point. In January 2008, Eliezer Yudkowsky examined this arguments in an informal presentation of his talk “The Human Importance of the Intelligence Explosion” at the Artificial Intelligence and Society event hosted by the University of Santa Clara and Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence.
Intuition is a vital component of intelligence; few of our daily activities actually require logic and we solve most of our daily problems using intuition-based methods. This includes body movement, understanding and using language, and learning new skills. Artificial Intuition may well be a stepping stone to full-blown AI, should be much easier to implement, and has many economically important applications. At the 2007 Foresight Vision Weekend, AI researcher Monica Anderson provided an analysis of the problem domains of Artificial Intelligence, and discussed the advantages and disadvantages of intuition based approaches.
The DARPA Grand Challenge race required robots to drive without human assistance along a 131-mile long course through the Mojave desert. The competition was won by the Stanford team led by Sebastian Thrun, having developed significant new AI technology for robot perception and decision making. At the 2006 Singularity Summit at Stanford he discussed how autonomous car capabilities compare with human-level cognition.
We know that highly intelligent people can make terrible decisions. The question therefore arises: Will our emotional, social, psychological, ethical intelligence and self-awareness keep up with our cognitive abilities? Max More offered his thoughts by outlining the goals of the proactionary principle at the 2006 Singularity Summit at Stanford.
On November 4, 2007 at the Vision Weekend Unconference held by the Forsight Nanotech Institute, Ben Goertzel spoke on the subject of creating artificial general intelligence in virtual worlds. His company Novamente has partnered with the Electric Sheep Company to roll out virtual animals such as dogs and parrots in Second Life. He believes that gradually climbing the scale of behavioral and cognitive complexity, eventually it will be possible to create human-level virtual agents in online virtual worlds.
At the 2007 Foresight Vision Weekend, Self-Aware Systems founder Stephen Omohundro led a discussion in which participants were asked to design the year 2030, assuming the existence of both self-improving artificial intelligence and productive nanotechnology. The speaker illustrated some of the likely characteristics of systems based on these technologies, including drives toward efficiency, self-preservation, resource acquisition, and creativity. The following group discussion focused on identifying rights and obligations that would provide potential societal benefits while preventing the inherent dangers of such advanced technologies.
Rodney Brooks is Director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Panasonic Professor of Robotics at MIT, and CTO of iRobot Corp (Nasdaq: IRBT). His 2007 Singularity Summit keynote speech, entitled “The Singularity: A Period Not An Event,” argued that the singularity will encompass a time where a collection of technologies were invented, developed, and deployed in fits and starts, driven not by the imperative of the singularity itself, but by the normal economic and sociological pressures of human affairs. While a Hollywood treatment of the singularity would have a world just like today’s, plus the singularity, as a singular event, in reality, the world will be changing continuously due to rapid growth in technologies that are both related and unrelated to the singularity itself.
Eliezer Yudkowsky has two papers forthcoming in the edited volume Global Catastrophic Risks (Oxford, 2007), “Cognitive Biases Potentially Affecting Judgment of Global Risks” and “Artificial Intelligence as a Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk.” At the 2007 Singularity Summit, he described how shaping a very powerful and general AI implies a different challenge, of greater moral and ethical depth, than programming a special-purpose domain-specific AI. The danger of trying to impose our own values, eternally unchanged, upon the future, can be seen through the thought experiment of imagining the ancient Greeks trying to do the same. Human civilizations over centuries, and individual human beings over their own lifespans, directionally change their moral values.
