The Road to Singularity: Ben Goertzel on AGI and The Fate of Humanity

The Michael Shermer Show Archives

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Dr. Ben Goertzel is a cross-disciplinary scientist, entrepreneur and author. Born in Brazil to American parents, in 2020 after a long stretch living in Hong Kong he relocated his primary base of operations to a rural island near Seattle. He leads the SingularityNET Foundation, the OpenCog Foundation, and the AGI Society which runs the annual Artificial General Intelligence conference.

Dr. Goertzel also chairs the futurist nonprofit Humanity+, serves as Chief Scientist of AI firms Rejuve, Mindplex, Cogito, and Jam Galaxy, all parts of the SingularityNET ecosystem, and serves as keyboardist and vocalist in the Jam Galaxy Band, the first-ever band led by a humanoid robot.

As Chief Scientist of robotics firm Hanson Robotics, he led the software team behind the Sophia robot; as Chief AI Scientist of Awakening Health he leads the team crafting the mind behind Sophia’s little sister Grace.

Dr. Goertzel’s research work encompasses multiple areas, including artificial general intelligence, natural language processing, cognitive science, machine learning, computational finance, bioinformatics, virtual worlds, gaming, parapsychology, theoretical physics and more. He has published 25+ scientific books, ~150 technical papers, and numerous journalistic articles, and given talks at a vast number of events of all sorts around the globe.

Before entering the software industry Dr. Goertzel obtained his PhD in mathematics from Temple University in 1989 and served as a university faculty in several departments of mathematics, computer science and cognitive science, in the US, Australia and New Zealand. His new book is The Consciousness Explosion: A Mindful Human’s Guide to the Coming Technological and Experiential Singularity.

Shermer and Goertzel discuss:

• Natural Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence
• General Intelligence (g) and Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)
• The alignment problem
• Consciousness and sentience
• Zombies and the Hard Problem of Consciousness
• Data, Sophia, and other robots
• Altered States of Intelligence
• Mind uploading and the self
• How would we know if an AI system was sentient?
• Can AI systems be conscious?
• Self-driving cars
• AI dystopia
• AI utopia
• AI protopia
• UBI
• What set of values should AI be aligned with, and what legal and ethical status should it have?
• Can AGI solve political and economic problems?

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