What is artificial general intelligence (AGI) and how close are we to getting there? What defines the next step, called artificial superintelligence (ASI), and why might the gap between those two be so dangerous? When machines become smarter than us, what roles are left for humanity? Should we think of AI as software, or as something we’re raising like a child? Will tomorrow’s AI destroy us, ignore us, or protect us? This week Eagleman talks with computer scientist & AI researcher Ben Goertzel.
A totally fascinating discussion. Savor every minute. Notwithstanding my long-standing interest in a breadth of AI topics, I was not aware of Ben Goertzel. My Bad.
Wonder what he'd have to say about this: "AI slop and scientific publishing?"
Ben lives in the Seattle area. Makes me like him all the more. I have serious PacNW history. See here and here. Still have many dear friends there.
OFF-TOPIC ERRATUM
Is Ben the Allan Stone (another PacNW cat) of ASI?
Just a thought. LOL. He describes himself as "a weekend musician."
_____
Back on topic...
Check out Ben's Substack. Bracing stuff.
apropos, some closing observations from this 1976 book.
Other Senses, Other Worlds, Ch. 11, Beyond Human Intelligence
…Is this as far as we can extrapolate from what we know of Laboratory Earth in our attempts to see into our own future or into other worlds?
Actually, it is not. It is within the realm of our reason and imagination to catch glimpses of still more distant possible descendants. We see that in nature successful solutions often arise by what is called convergence—that is, they arise independently in different lines that are often separated in time and place and are in no way related to each other, because these lines have encountered similar environmental problems and have coped with them in a similar way precisely because that solution is an efficient one.
Prehensile tails, for example, have developed in many kinds of monkey (although not in all), in the common opposum, and in several related
species, in the true chameleon and a few lesser genera, and in a fish, the sea horse. Similar needs in these disparate creatures have evoked a similar response in the structure and function of the tail.
In earlier pages we have from time to time described what amounts to a group brain as it exists among earth's social insects, which produces intelligent solutions, although the individuals comprising the groups are separately only capable of comparatively stereotyped actions. What if a group brain were to evolve where all the individuals were possessed of the kind of superbrain and superintelligence we are attributing to Homo neocorticus?
Utilizing the concept of convergence, we see that the social insects, by the use of chemical substances—the pheromones—that give off distinctive odors, have achieved almost instant communication, an important element in their cooperative actions. In a mass brain of cooperative superbrains that might evolve from Homo neocorticus, we could imagine an absolutely new type of communication emerging, no longer either verbal or even more refinedly symbolical. It could be a direct brain-to-brain awareness promoted by an individual brain's electric charges that might be intensified or modified so as to constitute an instant transmission without any kind of language, receptor mechanisms being evolved within the brain itself.
In order to conceptualize this thought, we paid a visit to a modern laboratory where electroencephalograms of patients being tested for brain disturbances are being recorded and processed all day long. We saw there a technician in her middle years who had spent all her working life recording and interpreting the "squiggles" registered by inked points onto long rolls of papers as they responded finely to the electric emanations of the patients' brains. The lengths of paper were subsequently folded into bound volumes.
This technician could open any of those records and read them, understanding all they implied, as easily as we read any page printed in our own language, and she was teaching her young assistants to do the same. In other words, the direct electric emanations from half a dozen different areas of the patient's brain simultaneously, with their respective periods of excitement and calm, had clear meaning for her, and she could read like a book any of the volumes in the large library of records of brain activity that were assembled on the shelves of her office. If we can imagine these inked lines of the EEC squiggles as an extremely primitive and crude form of what might ultimately evolve as a form of direct brain-to-brain communication, we believe we have a plausible model on which to base our speculations about our descendant species-after-next. Such instantaneous communication could easily suffuse an entire group and make possible intelligent mass action of an order that we can no longer imagine, or even speculate about.
The question that remains is: Why such a brain? What possible environmental circumstance could ever evoke it? And the answer is that once a higher intelligence appears on the natural scene, it makes its own environment. It is a matter of common observation among ourselves that every human being leaves a mark of his or her own personality upon surroundings. A housewife's individuality can almost be read by the condition in which we find her house—the order or disorder in which it is kept, the way it is furnished and decorated, the implements and equipment she uses. A man's fields or garden, office or workshop or den, also reveal much about him. It would seem that something of the brain and perhaps of the whole nervous system of each of us is displayed in the environments we make for ourselves. Even the little bowerbird reveals his individuality in the small objects he uses to decorate his bower and in his arrangement of them. And so we feel we are justified in assuming that as a brain evolves in complexity, it will surely be to the accompaniment of an increasingly complex ambience.
Human beings originally lived in the same "nature" as all other animals, and many still live very closely with it. If we camp in a forest, we do not actually need our superior mental equipment—that other creatures live out their lives in that forest is evidence of this. But most of us no longer live in natural settings, and even those who do, modify them with such artifacts as fire, weapons, and tools.
Today, all of mankind, some to a smaller but most to a larger extent, make our own habitats, and our man-made environment becomes more and more complex. Moreover, in the process of adjusting to our increasingly artificial surroundings, we become less and less fitted to live in natural ones, and so the course upon which we are embarked is far more likely to continue than to be reversed. For Homo neocorticus we can project a habitat of, to us, incredible complexity, and we can imagine that this will provide the spur that could eventually produce the Group-brained neocorticus, whom we could no longer designate as Homo.
At this point we pass our project over to our reader to use his or her imagination to visualize a meeting between Homo sapiens and Group-brained neocorticus, or its prototype as it may exist somewhere in the vastness of the universe.
'eh?
UPDATE
A Link to more AGI stuff I posted last year.
Stay tuned...
