Ari Heljakka
AI Engineer, Novamente LLC
Ari Heljakka is an artificial intelligence engineer for Novamente LLC. He received his Masters in Physics and a Bachelors in theoretical philosophy from the University of Helsinki. He has more than a decade's worth of experience in software development and authored the open-source software project AGISim, as well as the inference engine of the Novamente Cognition Engine. His scientific work in GenMind Ltd., a tech start-up company currently funded by the National Tech Agency of Finland, for which he serves as CEO currently consists of AI research aimed at developing robot cognition software based on Novamente AI engine.
He served as the conference chair of Transvision 2006 and was involve in a panel discussion in May of the same year called "How Do We More Greatly Ensure Responsible AGI?" at the Artificial General Intelligence Research Institute Workshop. There he posited the following conern regarding the risks involved in creating human-equivalent computer intelligence: "AGI is potentially extremely capable of carrying out any kind of action on this planet that humans could do right now - and an infinite number of more dangerous and more beneficial actions than we can do at this point. I suppose that's the premise that we all start from. Then there is the next question - what kind of artificial general intelligence is it going to be possible to create at all? And that's something we don't actually know the answer to.
"My point, very briefly put, is that we cannot really answer the questions of how to ensure responsible AGI before we have more information about what kind of architectures will it actually be feasible to produce, and what sort of behavior they show in the initial stages. Here, I suppose that we will actually have initial stages, further than we are right now, but not so close, beyond or equal to human-level intelligence as to actually become dangerous."
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"How Do We More Greatly Ensure Responsible AGI?"