Ben Goertzel (born December 8, 1966) is the founder and CEO of SingularityNET , a blockchain-based AI marketplace. [1] Goertzel is also the Chief Scientist of financial prediction firm Aidyia Holdings and robotics firm Hanson Robotics; Chairman of AI Novamente LLC, a privately held software company; Chairman of the Artificial Intelligence General Society and the OpenCog Foundation ; Vice Chairman of futurist nonprofit Humanity +; Scientific Advisor of Biopharma Firm Genescient Corp .; Advisor to the Singularity University; Research Professor in the Fujian Key Lab for Brain-Like Intelligent Systems at Xiamen University, China; and general Chair of the Artificial General Intelligence conference series, an American author and researcher in the field of artificial intelligence . He was the Director of Research of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (formerly the Singularity Institute ). [2]
Goertzel is the son of Ted Goertzel , a professor of sociology at Rutgers University . [3] He left high school after the tenth grade to attend Bard College at Simon’s Rock , where he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Quantitative Studies. [4] Goertzel went on to obtain a Ph.D. in mathematics from Temple University in 1989.
Life and career
Ben Goertzel is married for the third time, has three children and many pets. In his spare time he enjoys things like avant-garde fiction, music, philosophy, mathematics, exploring the outdoors. He is panpsychist and agnostic .
In 1966, he was born to Carol and Ted Goertzel, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. His parents are both American, and his heritage is mainly Eastern European Jewish. Goertzel has a dual US / Brazilian citizenship.
In 1985, he graduated from Simon’s Rock College with a degree in Quantitative Studies. [4] He moved to New York City and attended the NYU’s Courant Institute . During his spare time, he began to do serious research in cognitive science and AI.
In 1987, he moved to Philadelphia, attended graduate school at Temple University, and got married. In 1989, he received his PhD in mathematics and moved to Las Vegas to work as a mathematics professor at UNLV.
In 1995, he moved to Perth, Western Australia, where he had a research fellowship in Cognitive Science at the University of Western Australia.
In 1996 Goertzel, together with Francis Heylighen , founded the Global Brain Group to study the global brain of an intelligent Internet, and joined the scientific board of the newly founded Global Brain Institute at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel .
In 1997, Goertzel left the academy to start a software company and relocated to New York City to launch Intelligenesis Corp. (later known as Webmind Inc. ), a company with the mission of creating a truly intelligent system. [5] [6]
In 2001, Goertzel moved to New Mexico for a research professorship in the Computer Science Department of UNM and founded Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC . In 2002, he relocated to the Washington DC metro area.
In 2008, he founded OpenCog , which was an open-source AGI software project. In an August 2008 audio interview, [7] Goertzel stated that he is a founding member of the transhumanist’s Order of Cosmic Engineers and that he has signed up with Alcor to have his body frozen after his death, and that he expects to live essentially indefinitely barring some catastrophic accident.
In 2009, he became a Visiting Faculty member in the Artificial Brain Lab in Xiamen University in China, and began a project using OpenCog to control a humanoid robot.
In 2010, he began a collaborative project with Hong Kong Polytechnic University aimed at applying OpenCog to control intelligent game characters.
In 2011, he co-founded Aidyia Holdings , a startup company focused on HK stock prediction. He also worked for Genescient, a company that applied bioinformatics and other tools to exploit the genomes of long-lived flies to create therapeutics to combat age-associated disease. He also worked for Igenesis, a consulting / R & D firm based in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, which is involved in AI and other advanced software development.
In 2017, Goertzel joined forces with Dr. David Hanson and Cassio Pennachin to launch SingularityNET , the world’s first AI marketplace powered by blockchain technologies. [8] In an interview with Wired, [9] Goertzel said that with SingularityNET, AI agents and humanoid robots could reach human levels of intelligence within eight years.
Views on AI
In May 2007, Goertzel spoke at a Google Tech talk about Artificial General Intelligence. [10] He defines the ability to detect the phenomena in the world and the agent itself, measurable in terms of emerging behavior of “achieving complex goals in complex environments.” [11] He tries to create a “baby-like” artificial intelligence first, and then raises this agent in a simulated or second world way Second Life [12] to produce a more powerful intelligence. [13]Knowledge is Represented in a network nodes and links carry Whose probabilistic truth gains”attention values”, with the attention values resembling the weights in a neural network . Several algorithms operate on this network, the central one being a combination of a probabilistic inference engine and a custom version of evolutionary programming . [14] He claimed that this combination is able to avoid combinatorial explosions that both these algorithms suffer from when exposed to large problems.
Media appearances
2009: Goertzel and Hugo DeGaris starred in a 45-minute documentary called Singularity Gold Bust .
2012: The documentary The Singularity by independent filmmaker Doug Wolens showcased Goertzel’s vision and understanding of making general AI general thinking ” [15] [16]
2014: Goertzel appeared on the American science documentary television series, Through the Wormhole (episode 1, season 5).
See also
- Whole brain emulation
References
- Jump up^ “A New Project Aims to Create a Blockchain-Based AI Marketplace” . The Merkle . Retrieved 2017-10-03 .
- Jump up^ “The Singularity Institute’s Scary Idea,”The Multiverse According to Ben, 29 October 2010
- Jump up^ Pauling’s Prizes,The New York Times, 5 November 1995
- ^ Jump up to:a b Goertzel, Benjamin (1985). Nonclassical Arithmetics and Calculi . Simon’s Rock of Bard College.
- Jump up^ “Mathematician Sees The Mind for a Model For Company Intranets”,The Wall Street Journal, 22 May 1998
- Jump up^ Can a computer program figure out the market? A trainer and a mathematician are betting theirs,The New York Times, 8 February 1999
- Jump up^ The Future and You, 13 August 2008
- Jump up^ Lee, Yen Nee (2017-09-17). “This company wants to grow AI by using blockchain” . CNBC . Retrieved 2017-10-03 .
- Jump up^ “There umanoid robot Sophia al Wired Next Fest Tra otto anni sarà smart come noi – Wired” . Wired (in Italian). 2017-10-01 . Retrieved 2017-10-03 .
- Jump up^ Google Talk by Ben Goertzel, 30 May 2007
- Jump up^ Roberts, Jacob (2016). “Thinking Machines: The Search for Artificial Intelligence” . Distillations . 2 (2): 14-23 . Retrieved 17 February 2017 .
- Jump up^ “Online worlds to be AI incubators”,BBCNews, 13 September 2007
- Jump up^ “Virtual worlds making artificial intelligence apps ‘smarter'”ArchivedOctober 21, 2007, at theWayback Machine., Computerworld , September 13, 2007
- Jump up^ “Patterns, Hypergraphs and Embodied General Intelligence,”Ben Goertzel, WCCI Panel Discussion:”A Roadmap to Human-Level Intelligence” [ permanent dead link ] , July 2006
- Jump up^ “The Singularity: A Documentary by Doug Wolens” . Ieet.org . Retrieved 2013-10-22 .
- Jump up^ “Pondering Our Cyborg Future in a Documentary About the Singularity – Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg” . The Atlantic. 2013-01-08 . Retrieved 2013-10-22 .