Ben Goertzel

Ben Goertzel is the founder of SingularityNET, which uses blockchain to make AI available on the open market. The world needs this system, he argues, because he expects that AI with human-level intelligence will happen in his lifetime.

Once it does, the burning question will be which masters the AI will serve. Will it be used by power players for “spying on people, selling people things they don’t need and blowing people up?” he asks. Or, can it be harnessed for the greater good?

Goertzel founded SingularityNET to create a more democratic future for AI. Any company can request AI services. More significantly, it creates a network that allows AIs to freely share data that isn’t held hostage by any “owner.”

Goertzel has the pedigree to attain this goal. He was formerly a Director of Research at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. He’s chief scientist and chairman of the AI software company Novamente and chair of the OpenCog Foundation.

Goertzel proudly states he’s a “lover of avante-garde fiction, weird music, philosophy, mathematics, and wandering randomly in the forest.” He defies what it means to be an ordinary scientist.

He’s pragmatic and authentic; delivering complex topics in signature Goertzel style–effortlessly blending fact with humor.

A true polymath, his curiosity and excitement for the unknown are the reasons behind his almost-unbelievable academic achievements.

Goertzel believes that the narrowly-focused AI of today will eventually evolve into human-level AI that can generalize, imagine, and create. Eventually morphing into ASI, an artificial super-intelligence that forms a “global brain.”

AI “could quickly come as far beyond us as we are beyond a bacterium, cockroach or mouse,” he believes. A possibility he believes can happen within this century.

That creates both an opportunity and a worry, he says. He routinely hears from people who are concerned that AI will wipe out the human race or steal jobs.

Goertzel takes a more optimistic view. He envisions what Marvin Minsky called a “society of minds” in which specialized AIs network together to do everything from guiding meditation to curing disease.

He believes this future society will lead to “lives which have been made tremendously easy.”

©Prophets of AI