h+ Magazine

Singularity Institute’s Executive Director Luke Muehlhauser interviews AGI researcher (and Humanity+ Magazine Chief Editor, and Humanity+ Vice Chairman) Ben Goertzel on the nature and risks of AGI.

Our knowledge of how the human brain works is rapidly increasing and some people will use that knowledge to enhance their minds – to make themselves more intelligent, to feel permanently happy or to choose different aspirations. This will challenge the existing political order in many ways: Hyper-intelligent people will find it easy to dominate their relatively dim fellows.

With over 150,000 people dying every day, I hope governments would respond to the animal experiments by accelerating our journey to escape velocity through massively increasing funding for longevity medical research, because the cost of dying this year goes way up if it causes you to just miss out on the chance to live long enough to live forever.

Most of our holidays celebrate past events, or cyclical processes of nature – why not have a holiday to celebrate the future?

The universal forces of evolution have acted on organisms to create e.g. metazoan multicelluarity and its attendant specialization of cells, tissues, and organs. Similarly, human social roles are differentiated, and there are many specialized human “organs”.

In the second half of 2011, I started taking opinion polls on the subject of a potential impending Artilect War. This essay reports on the results of two such polls.

Who stop at femtotech? Physics also allows attotechnology and beyond to zeptotechnology. These “X-Tech” possibilities provide a potential solution to the Fermi Paradox (“where are all the nonhuman civilizations?”). We may need a paradigm shift from SETI to SIPI — the Search for Infra Particle Intelligence!

My goal in this essay is an ambitious one: to show how the properties of quarks and gluons can be used (in principle) to perform computation at the femtometer (i.e. 10^-15 meter) scale. This is admittedly highly speculative and theoretical material — but it’s all within the domain of science, and given the reality of exponential advance, may well become practical technology sometime in this century.

At the AGI-11 conference on Google’s campus in Silicon Valley, James Barrat concocted a simple survey and administered it after the conference to the email list of conference participants. His survey consisted of two brief questions: one on the time till AGI, and one on the likely positivity or otherwise of the outcome for humanity after AGI is created.

Sexual selection is a good way to model the evolution of information technology. It yields bioluminescence – the most common communication strategy on the planet – chirping insects, singing birds, Peacocks fanning their feathers, singing whales, speaking humans, and humans with internet access. These are all techniques of information production, transformation or evaluation.

Ben Goertzel converses with Hugo de Garis on his transhumanist argument for the reality of a Creator.