"We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us."

- (John Culkin, 1967)

Introduction

Since Prometheus' gift of fire to humankind, humans have been using it as a tool to adapt to their environment and ultimately adapt the environment to themselves. Yet, from contract law, to media, to the roads we create, human beings have also always been shaped by their very own tools. A set of foreseen and unforeseen consequences on the way people develop, learn, interact, or build relationships tend to manifest with ubiquitous tools. This is a rather obvious observation but an important one to make in order to contextualise the way that modern digital networked tools have affected people in the information age.

In this month’s AGI podcast, we were honored to receive and converse with Professor Brett Frischmann who recently wrote, along with his colleague Professor Evan Selinger, the book Re-Engineering Humanity joined. Much of the podcast’s discussion touches on subjects that the book covers in-depth and with a refreshing level of optimism despite the harsh reality it unveils.

The guest, Brett Frischmann, is the Charles Widger Endowed University Professor in Law, Business and Economics at Villanova University. He is also an Affiliate Scholar of the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School and a Trustee for the Nexa Center for Internet & Society in Torino, Italy. More importantly, Prof. Frischmann has researched extensively on knowledge commons, the Social Value of Shared Resources and techno-social engineering of humans (the relationships between the techno-social world and humanity). These subjects have long been core to the vision of SingularityNET and it was an exciting opportunity to discuss them with such a knowledgeable guest.

If we combine all the Wikipedias, there will be 27 billion words, written in 293 languages, spread across over 40 million articles.

By crowdsourcing knowledge and offering it for free over the internet, there is little doubt that Wikipedia has provided immense value to humanity. The project, unlike many others, successfully tapped into the open source spirit of the Web 1.0 and survived the onslaught of the walled gardens that sprung up as the web evolved. As the world’s most frequented encyclopedia in humanity’s history, it has achieved enviable success in its mission to democratize knowledge.

So why is Larry Sanger, the co-founder of Wikipedia, one of its harshest critics? What is his vision for a Wikipedia 2.0? And what has it got to do with the blockchain?

In the latest episode of the AGI Podcast, we asked Larry Sanger all of those questions — and more — for a fascinating and insightful conversation on knowledge marketplaces, decentralized curation, and finding the best of our knowledge.

“In forests, you have big trees and little trees and those trees are connected like a network in which the big trees share resources of sunlight and water to the little trees so that the little trees do not have to become competitors.” — Jan-Peter Doomernik

We were delighted to receive Mark Turrell on the AGI podcast for a fascinating and well-informed conversation on humanity, organising principles, structural tendencies and networks. Mark is a Harvard educated entrepreneur, educator, author and strategist. He has focused most of his life on understanding, solving and improving complex problems across industries and cultures. Be it from Europe, Africa or North America, Mark has helped companies scale -a topic on which he wrote a book about- and has passionately supported people and projects poised toward social good, for which he received the title of Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. Currently, he is an associate professor at Hult Business School and the CEO of both Orcasci and Vork, a strategy agency and a networking app, respectively.

If we were to end Mark’s introduction with a glimpse of his raison d’être, it would be with the following:

“My goal is to change the entire world for the better, all of it, at the same time, so that people can be happier, be less sad, and be free to choose. As a pragmatist, I develop plans and tactics to achieve this.”

We hope you enjoy listening as much as we did while interviewing Mark.

Though you can find transhumanists “by the millions” around the globe, you will not find many quite like Zoltan Istvan. His dedication to the cause of transhumanism has marked his political and public life and deserve a brief introduction.

Zoltan is one of the most vocal figures in the U.S today fighting to bring about an informed public conversation around the topic of fully integrating technology into our lives, and ultimately to kindle a transhumanist rights movement. Zoltan is the founder of the Transhumanist Party in the United States (US) for which he ran as the presidential nominee, and a journalist published by Vice’s Motherboard, Wired and Techchrunch. He is also the author of the Transhumanist Wager and the Transhumanist Bill of Rights. Recently Zoltan has given talks at the United Nations, World Economic Forum, and at the Global Innovation Forum in Armenia.

A Faith Misplaced

“There’s a good reason the first flying machines weren’t mechanical bats: people tried that, and they were terrible. - Dan Robitzski

In the current AI Spring, many people and corporations are betting big that the capabilities of deep learning algorithms will continue to improve as the algorithms are fed more data. Their faith is backed by the miracles performed by such algorithms: they can see, listen and do a thousand other things that were previously considered too difficult for AI.

Our guest for the third episode of the AGI Podcast, Pascal Kaufmann, is amongst those who believe such faith in deep learning is misplaced.

Rather than putting his faith in deep learning and other popular methods that seek to mimic the workings of the human brain, Pascal is taking a different route to create an AGI.

History seems to be on the side of Pascal. Those who sought to mimic the wings of the birds, to recreate them as they were, failed. Even today with all of our technology, such a task will be impossible. Only after realizing that it was the profile of the wings that was important, were we able to create flying machines.

Pascal’s quest to create human-level artificial intelligence can be traced back from his founding of the Mindfire Foundation, to his creation of the software company Starmind in 2010, to his experience dissecting fish brains at the Chicago Medical School and further back still to the time he learned about the Greek Titan Prometheus. His professor specifically instructed him to not follow in the footsteps of Prometheus, to not go about creating artificial humans. So he set about to do precisely that.

If he is to follow in the footsteps of the gods, Pascal must first crack the brain code.

A Grey and White Matter

“In one cubic millimeter of the cortex, there are nearly 100,000 neurons. That’s 100,000 microcircuits processing something. Humans have never made anything that complicated.” - Craig Forest

What is the brain code?

A simple and straightforward explanation the brain code would be: understanding the principles that make the brain work. To quote Pascal:

“I think we should look for the principals of the brain and not try to copy and paste the brain, because that would be impossible. You can’t simulate hundreds of billions of brain cells. You need to look for the principles, and I think we’re lagging in good principles. We are lagging in basic understanding of how the brain works. If we crack the brain code, I think we can build an artificial brain.”

Pascal searches for the mechanism with which he can decipher the brain, to be able to read and speak its language and to understand its basic principles. Pascal’s quest, in short, is for the cipher of intelligence - and he knows how to find it.

The Mergence of Minds

We are all now connected by the internet, like neurons in a giant brain. - Stephen Hawking

As the rate with which how information is shared in a society increases, so too does its technological progress. In the Renaissance Europe, the introduction of printing introduced the era of mass communication - which radically changed the evolution of its society. Telegram, Radio, Television, Cell Phones, and the Internet have massively increased the connectivity of humanity - which has resulted in an exponentially increasing rate of technological progress that will soon reach the point of technological singularity.

What can we achieve if we further increase our connectivity? What if we don’t have to search for the right person to give us the information that we seek? What if we create a network that allows talents to work on ideas with the comfort of knowing that their IP and original ideas are saved on the blockchain and will be credited to them? What if such a network is used to connect the AI talents around the world? What would such a network achieve?

At the core of Pascal’s quest is the Starmind based talent collaboration network. The Mindfire Network matches questions with real-time solutions from direct human input, maps the expertise within the network, creates a dynamic memory to leverage critical know-how and charts and selects talents autonomously and at a global scale.

Pascal believes that the brain code is going to be cracked sooner or later, and he fears for a world where such an information is not made open source but is accessible to a privileged few. He hopes that the Mindfire Foundation will crack the brain code first, that the Mindfire Network will enable talent collaboration on a massive scale and that such a collaboration will put to work the power of thousands or hundreds of thousands of brains into decoding the human brain.

Recently, SingularityNET partnered with Mindfire. As the Tech Oligopoly monopolizes the AI talent, SingularityNET can leverage the Mindfire Network to increase the collaboration of all the talent pools of open access networks that are willing to unite under the Decentralized AI Alliance (DAIA). Such a network will enable the AI talent pool of SingularityNET to find the relevant knowledge, access the right people and collaborate to create new services and solve challenges that they cannot do so alone.

SingularityNET has already taken the first step to greater connectivity and communication. In SingularityNET there will be a mergence of minds. SingularityNET will allow its AI Agents to exchange information and value with each other without any barriers. As the communication networks evolve and our connectivity with each other increases, as our brains merge with the AI of the future, we would be able to transfer information to each other directly - from one brain to another. That information would include our recorded experiences, as we lived them. Which raises the question, how many AGI would you spend to experience walking on the moon? More importantly: what would we create?

What’s Next?

If you would like to learn more about Mindfire and how you can help, please click here. If this episode piqued your interest, we recommend that you check out the second episode of the AGI Podcast in which Dr. Julia Mossbridge explores the possibility of being loved unconditionally by an Artificial Intelligence.

SingularityNET has a passionate and talented community which you can connect with by visiting our Community Forum. Feel free to say hello and to introduce yourself here. We are proud of our developers and researchers that are actively publishing their research for the benefit of the community; you can read the research here.

For any additional information, please refer to our roadmaps and subscribe to our newsletter to stay informed about all of our developments.

SingularityNET Releases Updated Roadmaps

Providing full visibility into our progress and core milestones for SingularityNET’s network architecture.blog.singularitynet.io

In this our second Episode we welcome our first guest to the series, Dr. Julia Mossbridge, A leading Cognitive Neuroscientist, Scholar and Author.

Julia has a Ph.D. in Communication Sciences and Disorders which she obtained from the Northwestern University. She also holds a Masters Degree in Neuroscience From the University of California San Francisco, and she received her B.A. with highest honors in neuroscience from Oberlin College in Ohio.

She is the Founder and Scientific Director of the Mossbridge Institute, a fellow Institute of Noetic Sciences, and a visiting Scholar at Northwestern University.

Dr. Mossbridge is widely published and has authored such books as ‘Transcendent Mind: Rethinking the Science of Consciousness’, and the soon to be released ‘The Premonition Code: The Science of Precognition, How Sensing the Future Can Change Your Life’

Julia also is the principle founder of ‘Loving AI’, a research project addressing how AI agents can communicate unconditional love to humans through conversations that adapt to the unique needs of each user. It is a collaboration between SingularityNET, Hanson Robotics and Lia Inc.

As always if you are interested to know more about SingularityNET or the Loving AI project, or indeed if want to find out more about any of our guests in general, please do drop us a line at info@SingularityNET.io

AGI & The Singularity - Dr. Ben Goertzel

In this inaugural episode we have the good fortune of interviewing the founder and CEO of Singularitynet, Dr. Ben Goertzel.

Having had a chance to spend quite a bit of time with Ben in Hong Kong, we were struck by not only the pace at which Ben and the team were moving the foundation forward, but also Ben’s earnest and unwavering commitment to creating a positive technological singularity.

Who is Dr. Ben Goertzel?

Dr. Ben Goertzel is the CEO and leading AI expert for SingularityNET, and chief Scientist of Hanson robotics, a Hong kong robotics company that is the creator of Sophia one of the world’s most advances humanoid robots.

Ben also serves as chairman of the artificial general intelligence society which hosts the annual AGI research conference series, its upcoming in August 2018, and the opencog foundation an organisation leading international development of advanced opensource AI tools.

Dr. Goertzel is one of the world’s foremost experts in Artificial Intelligence publishing over 141 scientific articles and 12 scientific books in the field of AI with the focus on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), and thinking machines with general cognitive capabilities of the human level and beyond.

He also has decades of expertise applying AI to practical problems in areas ranging from natural language processing and Datamining to robotics, video gaming, national security, and bio informatics.

Before relocating to HongKong in 2011 Dr. Goertzel held an executive roles AI consulting and product development firms, prior to that he served as a faculty member in mathematics at the university of Nevada las Vegas, in cognitive science at the university of western Australia, and in computer science at the Lucardo New Zealand