Future Current

At the AGI-09 post-conference workshop’s Roadmap Panel,  Itamar Arel of the University of Tennessee announced the founding of a wiki at agi-roadmap.org that will serve as a supplement to the creation of an AGI Roadmap.  Taking as examples several previous, related technology projects, J. Storrs Hall made mention of work conducted by the Foresight Institute on the Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems and Ben Goertzel discussed his participation in the writing of the Metaverse Roadmap.

Read the rest of this entry »

As AI developers are convening in San Francisco this week for the Game Developers Conference, another artificial intelligence conference is wrapping up in Arlington, Virginia, a short walk from the Pentagon. AGI-09, the second conference on artificial general intelligence, brings together researchers attempting to create learning, reasoning agents with broad, humanlike intelligence.

Organized by Dr. Ben Goertzel, chief science officer of Novamente LLC, the AGI conference series is a motivated effort to steer research back in the direction of the original intents of AI, namely to make a thinking machine. Goertzel’s plan is to inch up the cognitive ladder by incrementally developing more cleverly adaptive pets in virtual worlds and massively multiplayer online games.

>> GameSetWatch: The Merits of Novamente’s Parrots and the Arrival of Advanced AI

When cheap, advanced sensors give rise to ubiquitous monitoring technology, there will be the potential for what David Brin in The Transparent Society and others have called “sousveillance” to become universal. One could envision a future in which everyone was monitoring the activities of everyone else.  At the AGI-09 post-conference workshop, Ben Goertzel presented on a paper with Stephan Bugaj on various scenarios resulting from a future of advanced artificial intelligence that includes sousveillance technologies.

Read the rest of this entry »

Convergence08, the technology unconference, began with a different kind of AI debate: not on whether to create AI, or which technical path will work fastest, but how we can use AI technology to build the world we want to live in. Jonas Lamis of SciVestor moderated the panel of artificial intelligence experts, which included Barney Pell of Powerset, Steve Omohundro of Self-Aware Systems,  Peter Norvig of Google and Ben Goertzel of Novamente.

Read the rest of this entry »

Photo by brewbrooks

At the AGI-08 post-conference workshop Ben Goertzel presented on a paper with Stephan Vladimir Bugaj on the theory of stages of ethical development as applied to artificial intelligence systems.  Incorporating prior related theories by Kohlberg and Gilligan, as well as Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, the theory is then applied to the ethical development of integrative artificial general intelligence systems that contain components carrying out simulation and uncertain inference – the key hypothesis being that effective integration of these components is central to the ascent of the AGI system up the ethical-stage hierarchy.

Read the rest of this entry »

 At AGI-08: The First Conference on Artificial General Intelligence, Novamente LLC CSO Ben Goertzel presented on a paper by Cassio Pennachin et al. on a teaching methodology called Imitative-Reinforcement-Corrective (IRC) learning, proposed as a general approach for teaching embodied non-linguistic AGI systems.  IRC  is a framework for automatically learning a procedure that generates a desired type of behavior.  A set of exemplars of the target behavior-type are utilized for fitness estimation, reinforcement signals from a human teacher are used for fitness evaluation, and the execution of candidate procedures may be modified by the teacher via corrections delivered in real-time.

Read the rest of this entry »

In the introduction to the AGI-08 post-conference workshop on the futurological implications of artificial general intelligence, Novamente Chief Science Officer Ben Goertzel argued that it is worthwhile in planning for the future to put a certain amount of attention on the speculative aspects of present-day emerging technologies. The workshop’s introductory talk focuses on the significance of artificial general intelligence to the hypothesis of a technological singularity.

Read the rest of this entry »

At the AGI-08 post-conference workshop, Ben Goertzel presented on a paper by the speaker and the Singularity Institute’s director of open source projects, David Hart.  There he described the OpenCog software development framework for integrative artificial general intelligence. The framework’s libraries include a flexible knowledge representation embodied in a scalable knowledge store, a cognitive process scheduler, and a plug-in architecture for allowing interaction between cognitive, perceptual, and control algorithms.

Read the rest of this entry »

At the AGI-08 Conference on Artificial General Intelligence, Ben Goertzel presented on a paper by the speaker and Cassio Pennachin, in which series of hypotheses is proposed, connecting neural structures and dynamics with the formal structures and processes of probabilistic logic. In this framework, Hebbian learning at the synaptic level would be expected to have the implicit consequence of probabilistic deduction at the logical statement level.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Goertzel is Director of Research for the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, responsible for overseeing the direction of the organization’s research division. He has over 70 publications, concentrating on cognitive science and AI, including Chaotic Logic, Creating Internet Intelligence, Artificial General Intelligence (edited with Cassio Pennachin), and The Hidden Pattern, and is the chief science officer and acting CEO of Novamente, a software company aimed at creating applications in the area of natural language question-answering. At the 2007 Singularity Summit, he discussed the current prototype work involved in the release of intelligent agents controlled by the Novamente AI Engine in Second Life and other virtual worlds.

Read the rest of this entry »