Ben Goertzel: The Philosophical and Engineering Pursuit of Artificial General Intelligence

The conversation with Ben Goertzel, a prominent figure in the AGI community, delves into the profound philosophical and engineering challenges of Artificial General Intelligence. Goertzel discusses his lifelong fascination with AI, sparked by early science fiction like Star Trek, and his dual motivation for AGI: intellectual curiosity and the ambition to create something "much better" and "far far beyond the human level," capable of transcending human limitations such as death and suffering. He emphasizes AGI's potential to do good for humanity while also pushing beyond the human level of intelligence.

Goertzel draws heavily on literary and philosophical influences, particularly Stanisław Lem and Philip K. Dick, to explore different facets of intelligence. Lem's work, like "Solaris," introduces the concept of non-human, open-ended superintelligence that humans may struggle to comprehend, while Dick emphasizes the persistence of human compassion and love through various realities. This leads to a discussion on the possibility of "intraparticulate intelligence" – super-intelligences miniaturized to the quantum level, suggesting that human perception of reality may be profoundly limited. He also touches on Dostoevsky's polyphonic mode of fiction as a metaphor for how social reality is constructed from intersecting subjective understandings.

While the conversation is deeply philosophical, Goertzel's journey from science fiction fan to AGI engineer provides insight into the practical evolution of the field. He recounts how Douglas Hofstadter's "Gödel, Escher, Bach" shifted his perspective from passively waiting for future technology to actively working on AGI. He also highlights early futurist ideas from Gerald Feinberg's "The Prometheus Project" and Valentin Turchin's "The Phenomenon of Science," which foresaw AGI, nanotechnology, and immortality decades ago, underscoring that many contemporary singularitarian themes have deep historical roots. His work with SingularityNET and blockchain reflects a practical push towards democratizing technology.

The discussion extends to the nature of human drives, acknowledging an "unholy mix" shaped by individual and group selection rather than a single, pure objective function. Goertzel reflects on Nietzsche's concept of the "Superman" as a mind with "root access to its own brain and consciousness," capable of architecting its own values, seeing it as a precursor to modern cognitive science and AGI's potential to transcend biological biases. The podcast ultimately frames AGI not just as a technological endeavor but as a profound philosophical quest to understand and potentially redefine intelligence, consciousness, and humanity's place in the universe, with both amazing and scary implications.

what got me into Ai and science fiction and such in the first place wasn't a book but the original Star Trek TV show

Stannis slm was was very much an intellectual right so he he had a very broad view of intelligence going beyond the human and into what I would call you know open-ended super intelligence

Philip K dick he was a bit different he was human focused right his main thing was you know human compassion and the human heart and soul are going to be the constant that will keep us going through whatever aliens aliens we discover or telepathy machines or or or super AIS or or or whatever it might be

what we perceive as random fluctuations on the quantum or subquantum level may actually be the thoughts of the micro micro micro miniaturized super intelligences

not only will AGI let you go far beyond the limitations of the human but it could also like stop us from dying and and suffering and and and feeling pain and and tormenting ourselves mentally

the reality of the whole story is is an intersection like synergetically of the many different characters worldviews and that really it's a beautiful metaphor and even a reflection I think of how all of us socially create our reality

I see a bag of meat that I want to transcend by uploading into some sort of superior reality

I felt the the screenwriters of Star Trek had misunderstood the nature of intelligence and I complained to my dad about it

Nietzsche... he understood a lot about how human minds work then he understood a lot about how postum Minds would work I mean this Superman was supposed to be a mind that would basically have complete root access to its own brain and Consciousness and be able to architect it its own its own value system and inspect and fine-tune all all of its own its own biases

good and evil are very ambiguous complicated and in some ways silly Concepts