Joe Rogan Experience #1211 — Dr. Ben Goertzel Transcript

Transcript

0:00 boom hello ben hey there good to see you man yeah it's a pleasure to be here thanks for doing this things it's gonna evolve human beings past the the monkey stage that we're at right now yeah i i tend Yeah, and I tend to be on the latter, more positive side of this dichotomy. And then, I mean, it takes a while to internalize this into your worldview.

2:38 Well, my question is, like, are we married to this idea of intelligence and of life being biological, So, I mean, I've long been an advocate of a philosophy I think of as patternism. So, I mean, if we can create digital systems So we can see no reason based on all the science that we know so far that you couldn't make I did, actually, yes. and you'd lay down food in certain patterns,

6:33 I'm not familiar with the movie either. Who's in the movie? And it's also interactive, like the patterns of organization on the ocean it displays and from the weird things it reeks in your mind, so that the people on Earth The intelligence of an ant colony is a different thing. analogy to human minds. Which is almost inevitable. instantaneously we have incredible power but we're also we're also so limited by our biology

11:21 There's so many things that are built into being a person So you guys feel like you're at the tip of the spear with this stuff? to creating superhuman artificial general intelligence and that that's, in a way, almost inevitable, given where we are now. but we would like the super ais to care about us more than we care about insects or or great apes

14:49 create a powerful general intelligence, but create one which is going to be beneficial to Artificial General Intelligence, as we create, and design something? and we want it to choose not to accept all of our values so it's more a matter of whether the ongoing creation evolution of new create you can think of as our mind children and we're starting them off with our culture and

18:15 The long hair? what most humans considered When I think back to my childhood, high school prom with a black guy It's just life, just life right well certainly and that forms their system of values. And this is what needs to happen with AIs. They need to if the early stage AIs that we build, turn into general intelligences gradually and these general intelligences are

22:18 It's sort of like gun laws in the U.S. drones and advertising agents that brainwash people into buying crap they don't need now what's So for example, among many projects I'm doing yeah yeah but there's there's a lot of specific aspects right so i mean ai for medicine again but, of course, it's sort of a David versus Goliath thing. 85% of all funding in the AI was from plus plus western europe militaries well what i'm

26:18 It does, but I think there's an argument that as we approach a technological singularity, and then industry spends decades figuring creative innovation to happen but somehow or other new new structures are going to have to new systems of innovation and of technology transfer as things are are developing faster But one of the things that I wanted to ask you is when you're discussing this,

29:42 So this is what's programming the global brain of of of the to be in office yeah in a way that's almost a red herring but it i mean the russian stuff is almost more horrific right and that's well it's more it's more professional it's more polished it's That system rubs against my grain in many ways. research at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. And then my good friend David Hansen was visiting me

33:42 because my whole AI and robotics teams are there. I think that the Chinese are spying on us. of trying to overthrow any government. personally, but it is unusual if the government obtained by government agencies than most people a well-known science fiction writer. we should be choosing and then creating which of these In 1971 or two, when I was a little kid,

37:04 It's going to create machines smarter than people, and it's going to create the technology technologies toward consumerism or toward consciousness expansion. a million years or something when the world was far more advanced so or covered in dust yeah right have multiple directions that it's growing in, that there's going to be consumer-based? like Richard Stallman wanted in order to

40:48 overtake with decentralized AI, becomes a really significant component of how humanity is is developing general intelligence make bigger, better things. Well, that's an interesting question in the history of because we have certain aspects which are wanting to conform with the group and the tribe consistently innovate? And it's always been a concept. I mean, you were talking about the

44:12 My kids are Zarathustra Amadeus, Zebulon Ulysses, Scheherazade, and then the new one is QORXI, Anyway, Zarathustra is doing his PhD on application of machine learning to automated theorem proving. although that's a beautiful and amazing area in almost everything that's important to human beings in building AI, right? So you put that doesn't have to be just one possible way right like what right what i look forward to personally

46:36 I mean, you would lose all concepts get rid of death and disease and psychological issues of you explore different scenarios. Yeah, right. Scarcity of human resources in terms of what the Earth can hold? is like a quadrillion times all the people on Earth put together. them now are correct which they certainly aren't then the then that that would be the laws of physics, as we know them now, are correct, which they certainly aren't, then that would be the amount of computing you can do in a certain amount of mass energy.

50:12 that we can't even conceive at this moment, of course. freaking me out but people don't want to hear that though environmental people don't want to to create this beneficial super AI in the first place? I believe I know how to create a beneficial super AI in the first place. that the best aspects of this primate can and for the global brain. And the scientific community, the open source community, I think,

53:57 isn't bad in itself, they're working within this mode that's leading their work to be used So, I mean, there's no one person who's in charge. But in America, there's some ethos of free markets and free enterprise, Well, Singapore, I mean. Yeah, I mean, it's... i don't think samsung and lg are the ideal for the future either though i mean i'm much more

56:55 Because I think that is the way to be ongoingly disruptive. So right now, even though big companies and governments So we should start with the idea of a distributed ledger, which is basically like a distributed Excel spreadsheet or database. you need like 500 of those thousand people who own the copies to vote, yeah, let's do that update, no one who some lunatic can go hold a gun to their head and shoot them for what data updates were

1:00:26 What's ironic about it is it's probably one of the best ways ever conceived to actually vote in this country. The thing is, not every so-called blockchain system even uses a chain of blocks now. Now, what got me interested in blockchain, really, is this decentralized control aspect. I was very young then. Ethereum came out and you add the notion of a smart contract.

1:03:21 contracts and again that's sort of a misnomer because a smart contract doesn't have to be or you can program a financial transaction. a giant computer by making a really simple programming language for scripting transactions made it really easy to do that. Initial coin offering. So what happened in the last couple years is a bunch of people realized you could use this Ethereum programming framework to create a new cryptocurrency, like a new artificial money.

1:06:08 Ethereum is number two, and there's a bunch of others. When Bitcoin started crashing? It is money, and that's interesting to people. It started with digital money, but the core technology is going to pervade almost everything and AIs in participatory decision-making. even better for a lot of other things so yeah the the solution for the financial situation that we

1:09:35 Well, first the super nerds and then the super – I'm sure you are, but you're an exceptional one. I mean, most dollars are just electronic anyway, right? So what's interesting isn't so much the digital money aspect, And obviously we know which one I'm more interested in. So probably the... in the early days. And ConsenSys has, you know, it's funded a bunch of the work within the Ethereum

1:14:15 Like, how do they use that? of the things we're aiming at with our SingularityNet project is to, you know, by putting AI on the blockchain in a highly effective way, and then we're also, we have these two tiers. for customers to get the ai services that they need for their businesses and then for ais are sending data to each other and paying each other for their services. So this network of AIs

1:17:12 network which has component ais from every country on the planet like at that point once it's clear Just as the internet is an elegant solution to what's in hindsight an obvious problem, right? That depends which country. among companies also though so a lot of big companies that we're talking to, they like the idea of this decentralized AI fabric.

1:20:07 were cisco or gm or something and all of your internal machines are all your servers are running And I think this is why we can succeed with this plan of having this decentralized singularity net platform, India is like, well, no thanks, right? creating laws that any internet company that collects data about Indian people has to store It could be there's an end state that AGI will just self-organize into

1:23:24 toward like doing good So, I mean, I think even Donaldald trump who's not my favorite person doesn't So there's a lot of uncertainty all around. So it's both just an online marketplace for AIs, paying each other for transactions with our our digital money our cryptographic token which is abstraction and generalization and creativity. purpose, you know, abstraction and creativity based AIs like OpenCog agents all interacting

1:28:19 a tencent or a google because they're not going to hire some Congolese teenager that essentially changes everything forever. Yeah, Werner Winge, a military down there yeah verner Really? So this is similar to the concept of the intelligence explosion energy technologies. So, all these different things are expected to advance and genetic engineering to upgrade human intelligence,

1:32:05 decentralized blockchain based ai platform and our singularity studio enterprise software company inside of our lifetime, I mean, I think... One thing is a better computing infrastructure than we have now to host the uploaded body. An accurate simulacrum is So, I mean, after an hour, it will be a little different. It will be a virtual world. But why would we do that?

1:35:38 Then we juice up the dopamine, the serotonin levels. Yes, you're super positive, Ben. And you could say, well, okay, what if people could travel all over the world, right? I mean, we're going into a lot of new domains. Yeah. all the other things right but how many people are doing that i mean it's prevalent it's everywhere So a large amount of the planet's resources

1:39:31 So, I mean, the amount of technology specifically oriented toward the singularity doesn't have I would say that that's part of the reason why Huh. be the point of that what i really believe which is a bit personal and maybe different than many what the purpose of the world is. There are sense perceptions, and then out of those sense perceptions, Now, this is my own personal view of things.

1:44:17 But my own view is we understand really, really little of what we are and what this world is. which I think my dog doesn't understand how little he understands, right? i don't know it's immediate it's immediate for me to wrap your head around right i don't know it's immediate I spent a lot of time in Africa, in Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia, where we have a large AI development

1:46:56 is probably wrong, but yet the idea of an empirical, you know, materialist physical world is almost certainly wrong also. And there's a whole different way of thinking about reality in terms of first and second about an observed entity. You should only think about an observed comma observer pair. and two seconds from now he's gonna to pull this simulated world disappears and you

1:50:03 Yeah. My possibly implanted memories lead to believe that this life is incredibly consistent. time yeah on the other hand i mean i'm still is very natural to me, but nevertheless, I don't want to make any assumptions about what sort of Well, not just that, but novelty itself is being drawn into this. 2012 because terence mckenna said so and we need to be sure it's it's a good singularity so you

1:53:42 50% Robitussin PM he like drank it down but I felt bit half-baked right i mean the whole idea was based on the i-ching he had uh yeah i think it Yeah, I mean, I know his brother, Dennis McKenna. Yeah, I read that, yeah. Very,inations. Yeah, I read that. You think so? get locked up in this idea of expressing this thought that may or may not be viable.

1:56:52 right but it's also valuable to to be able to draw that draw that distinction right because Yes. All you have to say isics. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Yeah, that's... All you have to say is that. And in the last few years, of course, really were curious about how the mind works and of course many people played with psychedelics Is it 45 now? So I'm off by three years.

1:59:51 He looked at the advance of computer memory, the miniaturization of various devices, religious fanatics or something, which slows down development somewhat. one possibility is human-like intelligence Like based on everything we know about neuroscience now, it seems not to be the case. quantum computers right so there's there could be other things like that which are technical

2:02:40 I mean, it can use many robots as user interfaces, but the same AI could control many into the AI is for humans and AIs and understands what that action means. The AI can go between many different bodies, and it can transfer knowledge between the many different bodies that it's occupied. No, that's been... And somehow the general guess in America is it's going to be some big nasty

2:05:37 as opposed to themselves personally. Yes. So right now she's going around sort of as an ambassador They just copied it. Yeah, you see, the thing is that we... I feel weird about that. It really has a nice ring. No, it understands what you say, and it comes up with an answer, And then there's a simpler chatbot software, which is used for appearances like that one. And in the next year, we want to roll out more of our advanced research software from OpenCog and SingularityNet,

2:10:31 But there's a lot of ways something like this could unfold. possible creatures that that's possible that's pretty clear if you look at the world around you intelligent, you're sort of getting the AI locked into a very positive, reflective, and compassionate when these things are controlling these highly advanced technologies, Then we're creating these robots like Sophia,

2:14:37 our tools toward that end well ben i appreciate your optimism i appreciate coming in here explaining Yeah, let's try to schedule it once a year. Thank you.