Ben Goertzel on AI and the Singularity: The Future Is Ours To Create

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Today, my guest is Ben Goertzel. During our 40 min conversation, we cover a wide range of topics such as Ben’s original interest in time travel and science fiction, his decision to start working on artificial general intelligence, and his views on the potential timeline thereof, together with his evaluation of the software vs hardware requirements for building it; scientific funding for AI research in both the USA and China; the technological singularity and our chances of surviving it. (You can listen to or download the audio file above, or you can scroll down and watch the full video of the interview below.)

As attested by his short bio below, Ben is a brilliant AI scientist with a vast spectrum of interests and talents. Even more, I can’t help but mention that he is also a genuinely nice guy because, due to some technical difficulties, he was willing to patiently reschedule our interview twice before we finally managed to get it right. Given the number of other things Ben juggles in his busy schedule, it would have been only natural for him to cancel. Yet he patiently persisted, and I am grateful for and appreciative of his time.

Who is Ben Goertzel

Dr. Ben Goertzel is CEO of AI software company Novamente LLC and bioinformatics company Biomind LLC; Chief Technology Officer of biopharma firm Genescient Corp.; leader of the open-source OpenCog AI software project;  Chairman of Humanity+; Advisor to the Singularity University and Singularity Institute; 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.

His research work encompasses artificial general intelligence, natural language processing, cognitive science, data mining, machine learning, computational finance, bioinformatics, virtual worlds and gaming, and other areas. He has published a dozen scientific books, nearly 90 technical papers, and numerous journalistic articles.  Before entering the software industry he served as a university faculty in several departments of mathematics, computer science, and cognitive science, in the US, Australia and New Zealand.  He has three children and too many pets, and in his spare time enjoys creating avant-garde fiction and music, and the outdoors. For more see Goertzel.org

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