YouSaid · the spoken record

Ben Goertzel

lines on the record: 334
first: 2020-06-22
most recent: 2020-06-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“But yeah, the thing is that really had the feeling of a group of starry-eyed mavericks. Huddled in a basement like plotting how to overthrow the narrow AI establishment. And, you know, for the first time in some cases coming together with others who shared their passion for AGI and the technical seriousness about working on it, right? And that, I mean, that's... Very, very different than what we have today. I mean, now it's a little bit different. We have AGI conference every year, and there's several hundred people rather than 50. Now it's more like this is the main gathering of people who want to achieve AGI and think that large-scale nonlinear regression is not the golden path to AGI. So, I mean”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, DC has a lot of AI going on. Probably until the last five or ten years, much more than Silicon Valley, although it's just quiet because of the nature of what happens in DC. Their business isn't driven by PR. Mostly when something starts to work really well, it's taken black and becomes even more quiet, right?”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Trying to pull together in the AGI community, it was in, I guess, the early aughts when I was living in Washington, D.C. and making a living doing AI consulting for various U.S. government agencies. And I organized the first AGI workshop in 2006. And I mean, it wasn't like it was literally in my basement or something. I mean, it was in the conference room I did Marriott in Bethesda. Not that edgy or underground, unfortunately, but still.”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And 70s, John Andreas was trying to build probabilistic reinforcement in AGI systems, the technology, the computers just weren't there to support it. His ideas were very similar to what people are doing now. But although he's long since passed away and didn't become that famous outside of Canterbury, I mean, the lineage of ideas passed on from him to his students to their students. You can go trace directly from there to me and to deep mind, right? So there was a lot going on in AGI that did. Ultimately, lay the groundwork for what we have today. But there wasn't a community, right? And so when I started.”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, yeah, anyway, I mean, John Andreas had his probability theory based reinforcement learning proto-agi, John Cleary was trying to do much more ambitious probabilistic AGI systems. Now John Cleary helped do Weka, which is the first open source machine learning toolkit, so the predecessor for TensorFlow and Torcha and all these things. Also, Shane Legg was at Waikado working with John Cleary and Ian Witten and this whole group and then working with my own companies, my company WebMind, an AI company I had in the late 90s with a team there at Waikato University, which is how Shane got his head full of AGI, which led him to go on with Genesis Abbas found deep mind. So what you can see through that lineage is, you know, in the 80s.”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Java was easier for students. Amusingly, a lot of the work on Weka when we were in New Zealand was funded by New Zealand government granting to predict the menstrual cycles of cows. So in the US, all the grant funding for AI was about how to kill people or spy on people. In New Zealand, it's all about cows or kiwi fruits, right? Yeah.”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look at John Andreas at University of Canterbury with his purpose reinforcement learning Markov system, he was the PG supervisor for John Cleary in New Zealand. Now John Cleary worked with me when I was at Waikato University in 1993 in New Zealand and he worked with Ian Witten there and they launched Weka which was the first open source machine learning toolkit which was launched in I guess 93 or 94 when I was at Waikado University”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Learning, right? It should be learning from experience. And the AI field then was not interested in. Learning from experience. I mean, some researchers certainly were. I mean, I remember in mid 80s, I discovered a book by John Andreas, which was, it was about reinforcement learning system called purpose, P-U-R-P-U-S-S, which was an acronym that I can't even remember what it was for purpose anyway. But AGIC by some sort of fancy like Markov decision process learning it was supposed to learn everything just from the bits coming into it and learn to maximize its reward and become intelligent, right? So that was there in academia back then, but it was like isolated, scattered weird people. But all these isolated, scattered weird people in that period, I mean, they laid the intellectual grounds for what happened later.”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every day driving her bicycling to temple from my house is like a new adventure. But yeah, the reason I didn't do a PhD in AI was what people were doing in the academic AI field then was just astoundingly Boring and seemed wrong headed to me. It was really like rule based expert systems and production systems. And actually, I loved mathematical logic. I had nothing against logic as the cognitive engine for an AI. But the idea that you could type in the knowledge that AI would need to think seemed just completely stupid and wrong-headed to me. I mean, you can use logic if you want, but somehow the system has got to be...”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Pearl of the US. You never stopped in a red light then because you were afraid if you stopped at a red light someone will carjack you. So you stripped through every red light. Yeah.”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was pretty much independent of AI military summers and winters in the US. So there's been more going on in AI globally than not only most people on the planet realize, but then most new AI PhDs realize because they've come up within a certain sub field of AI and haven't had to look so much beyond that. But I would say when I got my PhD in 1989 in mathematics, I was interested in AI already.”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I would say the correlation between funding and intellectual advance was not 100% right because, I mean, in Russia, as an example, or in Germany, there was less dollar funding than in the US, but many foundational ideas were laid out, but it was more theory than implementation, right? And U.S. really excelled at sort of breaking through from theoretical papers to working implementations which did go up and down somewhat with US military funding, but still, I mean, you can look in the 1980s, Dietrich Derner in Germany had self-driving cars on the Audubon, right? And I mean, it was a little early with regard to the car industry, so it didn't catch on such as has happened now. But, I mean, that whole advancement of self-driving car technology in Germany.”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. First, I would say as a side point, the winters and summers of AI are greatly exaggerated by Americans. And that if you look at the publication record of the artificial intelligence community since, say, the 1950s, you would find a pretty steady growth in advance of ideas and papers. And what's thought of as an AI winter or summer was sort of how much money is the U.S. military pumping into AI? Which was meaningful. On the other hand, there was AI going on in Germany, UK, and in Japan and in Russia, all over the place while US military got more and less enthused about AI. So”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're all bad. On the other hand, everyone knows what AI is. And AGI seems immediately comprehensible to people with a technical background. So I think the term has served as sociological function. Now it's out there everywhere, which”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, he's just looking at it differently. He's looking at complex self-organizing systems and looking at an intelligent system as being one that, you know, revises and grows and improves itself in conjunction with its environment without necessarily there being one objective function that's trying to maximize. Although over certain intervals of time, it may act as if it's optimizing a certain objective function, very much Solaris from Stanis Sthlem's novels, right? So yeah, the point is artificial general and intelligence. Don't worry.”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, intelligence is not very well defined either. I mean, what does it mean? I mean, in AI now, it's fashionable to look at it as maximizing and expected reward over the future. That sort of definition is pathological in various ways. And my friend David Weinbaum aka Weaver, he had a beautiful PhD thesis on open end intelligence, trying to conceive intelligence in a”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you're obliged to make the kids weird enough that they like the names. It directs their upbringing in a certain way. But yeah, anyway, I mean, What Mark has shown in that book is that a truly general intelligence theoretically is possible but would take infinite computing power. So then the artificial is a little off, the general is not really achievable within physics as we know it. And I mean physics as we know it may be limited, but it's what we have to work with now. Intelligence”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I mean, my oldest son, Zarathustra, loves his name, and my daughter, Sharazad loves her name. So far, basically, if you give your kids weird names, they live off.”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A new child to run. I did it first. He copied me with this new freakish name. But now if I have another baby, I'm going to have to outdo him. It's becoming an arms race of weird geeky baby names. We'll see what the babies think about it”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“His first name is Quirksy Q-O-R-X-I, which my wife came out with. But that's an acronym for quantum organized rational expanding intelligence. His middle name is middle name is Exiphanes actually, which is the former principal underlying Aixy.”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if you assume computable environments, the computable reward functions, then he articulates what would be a truly general intelligence A system called AIXI, which is quite”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Innovative or anything. It's one of these obvious. Hindsight things, which is also. Annoying in a way because Josh Abach, who you interviewed, is a close friend of mine. He likes the term synthetic intelligence, which I like much better, but it hasn't actually caught on, right? Because, I mean, artificial is a bit off to me because artifice is like a tool or something, but not all AGIs are going to be tools. I mean, they may be now, but we're aiming toward making them agents rather than tools. And in a way, I don't like the distinction between artificial and natural because we're part of nature also and machines are part of nature. I mean, you can look at Evolve versus Engineered, but that's a different distinction. It should be engineered in general intelligence, right? And then general, well, if you look at Marcus Hooter's book, Universally, what he argues there is, you know, within the domain of computation theory, which is limited but interesting.”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, we use that for the title of the book. And so I think I maybe both Shane and Peter think they invented the term. But then later, after the book was published, this guy, Mark Gubrid, came up to me and he's like, well, I published an essay with the term AGI in like 1997 or something. And so I'm just waiting for some Russian to come out and say they published that in 1953. I mean, that term is not dramatically...”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“AGI, we used it for the title of that book. Part of Peter and Shane's reasoning was you have the G factor in psychology, which is IQ, general intelligence, right? So you have a meaning of GI, general intelligence in psychology. So then you're looking like artificial GI.”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there was already a meaning to strong AI, which was complexly different but related, right? So we were tossing around on an email list should be. And so we talked about narrow AI, broad AI, wide AI, narrow AI, general AI. And I think it... It was either Shane Legg or Peter Vos on the private email discussion we had. You said, well, why don't we go with AGI, Artificial General Intelligence? And Pei Wang wanted to do GAI general artificial intelligence because in Chinese it goes in that order. But we figured. Gay wouldn't work in U.S. culture at that time, right? So we went with the...”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's just a different kind of AI. Ray Kurzweil wrote about narrow AI versus strong AI. But that seemed weird to me because First of all, narrow and stronger, not Anton. That's right. But secondly, strong AI was used in the cognitive science literature to mean the hypothesis that digital computer AIs could have true consciousness like human beings.”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who by now has become rich and famous. He was one of the co founders of Google Deep Mind. But at that time, Shane I think he may have just started doing his PhD with Marcus Hooter, who at that time hadn't yet published his book, Universal AI, which sort of gives a mathematical foundation for artificial general intelligence. So I reached out to Shane and Marcus and Peter Vos and Pei Wang, who was another former employee of mine, who had been Douglas Hofstadter's PhD student, who had his own approach to AGI, and a bunch of some Russian folks reached out to these guys and they contributed papers for the book. But that was my provisional title, but I never loved it because in the end, you know, I was doing some what we would now call narrow AI as well, like applying machine learning to genomics data or chat data for sentiment analysis. I mean, that work is real. And in a sense, it's really...”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, yeah, I would say I launched the term AGI upon the world for what it's worth without ever fully being in love with the term. What happened is I was editing a book, and this process started around 2001 or 2. I think the book came out 2005 funnily. I was editing a book, which I provisionally was titled Real AI. And I mean, the goal was to gather together fairly serious academic-ish papers on the topic of making thinking machines that could really think in the sense like people can or even more broadly than people can, right? So then I was reaching out to other folks that I had encountered here or there who were interested in that, which included some other folks out of the who I knew from the transhumanist and singularitarian world like Peter Voss, who has a company AGI Incorporated still in California and included Shane Legg, who had worked for me at my company WebMind in New York in the late 90s.”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, because if you can make it a benevolent AGI, then all the other problems are solved. I mean, then the AGI can be, once it's as generally intelligent as humans, it can rapidly become massively more generally intelligent than humans. And then that AGI should be able to solve science and engineering problems much better than human beings, as long as it is in fact motivated to do so. That's why I said a benevolent AGI. There could be other kinds.”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“AGI is by far the most important thing that's on the horizon and then technologies that have direct ability to enable AGI or to accelerate AGI are also very important. For example, say quantum computing, I don't think that's critical to achieve AGI, but certainly you could see how the right quantum computing architecture could massively accelerate AGI. Similar other types of nanotechnology, right? Now, the quest to cure aging and end disease while not in the big picture as important as AGI. Of course, it's important to all of us as individual humans. And if someone made a super longevity pill and distributed it tomorrow, I mean, that would be huge in a much larger impact. Than the Mars colony is going to have for quite some time.”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and it's very clear that we will to me because there's so much economic value in getting from narrow AI toward AGI, whereas the Mars colony, there's less economic value until you get quite far out into the future. So I think that's very interesting. I just think it's somewhat off to the side. I mean, just as I think say, you know, art and music are very, very interesting. And I want to see resources go into amazing art and music being created. I'd rather see that than a lot of the garbage that society spends their money on. On the other hand, I don't think Mars colonization or inventing amazing new genres of music is not one of the things that is most likely to make a critical.”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of course, it's the first step on a long journey, which is awesome. I'm guessing the colonization of the rest of the physical universe will probably be done by AGIs that are better designed to live in space than by the meat machines that we are. But I mean, who knows? We may cryopreserve ourselves in some superior way to what we know now and like shoot ourselves out to Alpha Centaurium beyond. I mean, that's all cool. It's very interesting and it's much more valuable than most things that humanity is spending its resources on. On the other hand, with AGI, we can get to a singularity before the Mars colony becomes sustaining for sure, possibly before it's even operational. So your situation...”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, it's more important than making chocolate or chocolates and sexier lingerie and many of the things that we spend a lot more resources on as a species, right? So, I mean, we certainly should do it. I think the... The possible futures in which a Mars colony makes a critical difference for humanity are very few. I mean, I think assuming we make a Mars colony and people go live there in a couple of decades, I mean, their supplies are going to come from Earth, the money to make the colony came from Earth. And whatever powers are supplying the goods there from Earth are going to, in effect, be in control of that Mars colony. Of course, there are outlier situations where Earth gets nuked into oblivion and somehow Marth has been made self-sustaining by that point. And then Mars is what allows humanity to persist. But I think that...”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Clearly Marx didn't quite have the right idea about how to get there. I mean, he missed a number of key aspects of human society and its evolution. And if we look at where we are in society now How to get there is quite different question because they're very powerful forces pushing people in different directions than a positive, joyous, compassionate existence, right?”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think my feeling now subjectively is the culture aspect is more significant than I thought it was when I was a teenager. And I think You could have a human society that was dialed dramatically further toward self awareness, other awareness, compassion, and sharing than our current society. And of course greater material abundance helps, but to some extent material abundance is a subjective perception also because many Stone Age cultures perceive themselves as living in great Material abundance that they had all the food and water they wanted, they lived in a beautiful place. They had Sex lives that they had children. I mean, they had abundance without any factories, right? So I think humanity probably would be capable of fundamentally more positive and joy-filled mode of social existence than what we have now”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because they believed in the withering away of the state. They believed that as you move from capitalism to socialism to communism, people would just become more social-minded so that a state would be unnecessary and people would just everyone would give everyone else what they needed. Now, setting aside that's not what the various Marxist experiments on the planet seem to be heading toward in practice, just as a theoretical point, I was very dubious that human nature could go there. At that time, when my great-grandparents are alive, I was just like, you know, I'm a cynical teenager. I think humans are, humans are just jerks. The state is not going to wither away. If you don't have some structure keeping people from screwing each other over, they're going to do it. So now I actually don't quite see things that way.”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Their evolutionary roots to individual and group selection leading to a mix of selfishness and altruism. On the other hand, different cultures manifest that in different ways, while we all have basically the same biology, and if you look at sort of pre-civilized cultures, you have tribes like the Yanamamo in Venezuela, which their culture is focused on killing other tribes. And you have other Stone Age tribes that are mostly peace-born, have big taboos against violence. So you can certainly have a big difference in how culture manifests these innate biological characteristics, but still, you know, there's probably limits that are given by our biology. I used to argue this with my great-grandparents who were Marxists, actually.”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, the answer to nature versus nurture is usually both. And of course, it's nature versus nurture versus self-organization, as you mentioned. So clearly.”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I work with a company called Gineshians, Which was evolving flies to have extraordinary long lives in Southern California. So we had flies that were evolved by artificial selection to have five times the lifespan of normal fruit flies. But the population of super long-lived flies Was physically sitting in the spare room at an Ayn Rand Elementary School in Southern California. So that was just like, well, if I saw this in a movie, I wouldn't believe it.”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just distract ourselves. I have to make one amusing comment. Sure. Comment that. Has amused me anyway. Yeah, I have extraordinary negative respect for Ayn Rend. What's a negative respect?”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And when I walk through the streets and all this, you know, there's people lying by the side of the road, like just living there by the side of the road, dying probably of curable diseases without enough food or medicine. And when I walk by them, you know, I feel terrible. I give them money. When I come back home to the developed world, Not on my mind that much. I do donate some, but I mean, I also spend some of the limited money I have enjoying myself in frivolous ways rather than donating it to those people who are right now like starving, dying, and suffering on the roadside. So does that make me evil? I mean, it makes me somewhat selfish and somewhat altruistic. And we each balance that in our own way, right? So Whether that will be true of all possible AGIs is a subtler question. That's how humans are.”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I think at core, we're not purely selfish. We're not purely altruistic. We are a mix. And that's the nature of it. And we also have a complex constellation of values that are just very specific to our evolutionary history. We love waterways and mountains and the ideal place to put a house is in a mountain overlooking the water, right? And we care a lot about our kids and we care a little less about our cousins and even less about our fifth cousins. I mean, there are many particularities to Human values, which, whether they're good or evil, depends on your perspective. See, I spent a lot of time in Ethiopia, in Addis Ababa, where we have one of our AI development offices for my singularity net project”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“good and evil within us, right? Because a lot of what we view as evil is really just selfishness. And a lot of what we view as good is altruism, which means doing what's good for the tribe. And on that level, we have both of those just baked into us. And that's how it is. Of course, there are psychopaths and sociopaths and people who get gratified by the suffering of others and that's. That's a different thing.”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tribal group selection means humans in a way will do what will advocate for the persistence of the DNA of their whole tribe or their social group. And in biology, you have both of these, right? And you can see, say, an ant colony or a beehive, there's a lot of group selection in the evolution of those social animals. On the other hand, say a big cat or some very solitary animal, it's a lot more biased toward individual selection. Humans are an interesting balance. And I think this reflects itself in what we would view as selfishness versus altruism to some extent. So we just have both of those objective functions contributing to the makeup of our brains. And then as Nietzsche analyzed in his own way and others have analyzed in different ways, I mean, we abstract this as, well, we have both.”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To the top. Good and evil are. Very ambiguous, complicated, and in some ways silly concepts. But if we could dig into your question from a couple directions. So I think if you look in evolution, Humanity is shaped both by individual selection and what biologists would call group selection, like tribe-level selection, right? So individual selection has driven us in a selfish DNA sort of way so that each of us does, to a certain approximation, what will help us propagate our DNA to future generations. I mean, that's why I've got to four kids so far. Probably that's not the last one. On the other hand,”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An unholy mix of things. I don't think there's one pure, simple, and elegant objective function driving humans by any means.”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He didn't I would say that, I mean, he had. He had a lot of inklings of modern cognitive science, which are very interesting. If you look in the third part of the Collection that's been titled The Will to Power. I mean, in book three, there's very deep analysis of thinking processes. But he wasn't so much of a physical tinker type guy. He was very abstract.”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Indirectly, even of technology. But of course, without the technology there, it was all some quite abstract thinking. So now we're at a time in history when a lot of these ideas Can be made real, which is amazing and scary, right?”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was a very astute analyst of how the human mind constructs the illusion of a self, how it constructs the illusion of free will, how it constructs values like good and evil out of its own desire to maintain and advance its own organism. He understood a lot about how human minds work. Then he understood a lot about how post-human minds would work. I mean, this Superman was supposed to be a mind that would basically have complete root access to its own brain and consciousness and be able to architect its own value system and inspect and fine-tune all of its own biases. So that's a lot of powerful thinking there, which then fed in and sort of seeded all of postmodern continental philosophy and all sorts of things have been very valuable in development of culture.”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that I mean, Nietzsche, who you mentioned, had the idea of the Superman, right? But he didn't. Understand enough about technology to think you could physically engineer a superman by piecing together molecules in a certain way. He was a bit vague about how the superman would appear, but he was quite deep at thinking about what the state of consciousness and the mode of cognition of a superman.”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source