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

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“Now for whom these things have just been part of the ambiance of culture for their whole career or even their whole life.”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You could get like Atari 400 and Commodore VIC-20, and you could type on the keyboard and program in higher level languages alongside the assembly language. So these ideas have been building up a while, and I guess my generation got to feel them. Build up, which is different than people coming into the field.”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These are not that new, right? They're sort of new in the history of the human species, but I mean, these are all around in fairly mature form in the middle of the last century were written about quite articulately by fairly mainstream people who were professors at top universities. It's just until the enabling technologies got to a certain point, then you couldn't make it real. And even in the 70s, I was sort of seeing that and living through it, right? From Star Trek to Douglas Hofstader, things were getting very, very practical from the late 60s to the late 70s. And, you know, the first computer I bought, you could only program with hexadecimal machine code and you had to solder it together. And then like a few years later, there's punch cards. And a few years later.”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Many of the themes I engaged with now from AGI and immortality even to trying to democratize technology as I've been pushing forward with singularity in my work in the blockchain world, many of these themes were there in Fine bomb's a book in the late 60s even. And of course Valentin Churchin, a Russian writer and a great Russian physicist who I got to know when we both lived in New York in the late 90s and early aughts. I mean he had a book in the late 60s in Russia which was the phenomenon of science which laid out all these same things as well. And Val died in, I don't remember 2004 or 2005 or something of Parkinson'sism. So yeah, it's easy for people to lose track now of the fact that the futurist and singularitarian advanced technology ideas that are now almost mainstream and are on TV all the time. I mean these”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Didn't quite happen, and I think this guy died in the mid 80s, so he didn't even see his ideas start to become more mainstream. But it's interesting.”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this book was written in the late 1960s, though I encountered it in the mid 70s. But what this book said is in the next few decades, humanity is going to create superhuman thinking machines, molecular nanotechnology, and human immortality. And then the challenge we'll have is what to do with it. Do we use it to expand human consciousness in a positive direction? Or do we use it just to further vapid consumerism? And what he proposed was that the UN should do a survey on this. And the UN should send people out to every little village in remotest Africa or South America and explain to everyone what technology was going to bring the next few decades and the choice that we had about how to use it and let everyone on the whole planet vote about whether we should develop super AI nanotechnology and immortality for expanded consciousness or for rampant consumerism. And needless to say,”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if you think about, I mean, I was interested in what we'd now call nanotechnology and in the... Human immortality and time travel, all the same cool things as every other science fiction loving kid. But AI seemed like if Hofstadter was right, you just figure out the right programs sit there and type it. You don't need to spin stars into weird configurations or get government approval to cut people up and fiddle with their DNA or something, right? It's just programming. And then, of course, that can achieve anything else. There's another book from back then which was by Oda Feimbaum, Gerald Feinbaum, who was a physicist at Princeton. And that was the Prometheus project.”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I should figure out how to build a spacecraft traveling close to the speed of light. Go far away, then come back to the Earth in a million years when technology is more advanced and we can build these things. Reading Gordel Sherbach, while it didn't all ring true to me, a lot of it did, but I could see like there are smart people right now at various universities around me who are actually trying to work on building what I would now call AGI, although Hofstadter didn't call it that. So really it was when I read that book, which would have been probably middle school, that then I started to think, well, this is something that I could practically work on.”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was the first book I read that. Me a feeling for AI as a practical academic or engineering discipline that people were working in. Because before I read Cordelia Sharbach, I was into AI from the point of view of a It may be a long time before we can achieve immortality and superhuman AGI. So,”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was into some futuristic things even back then, but whether AI could confront logical paradoxes or not, he didn't know. But when I, 10 years after that or something, I discovered Douglas Hofstadter's book, Gordela Scherbach, and that was sort of to the same point of AI and paradox and logic, right? Because he was over and over with Gordel's incompleteness theorem. And can an AI really fully model itself reflexively, or does that lead you into some paradox? Can the human mind truly model itself reflexively, or does that lead you into some paradox? I think that book, Gordel Esther Bach, which I think I read when it first came out, it would have been 12 years old or something. I remember it was like 16-hour day. I read it cover to cover and then reread it. I reread it after that because there was a lot of weird things with little formal systems in there that were hard for me at the time.”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And before I was born, when my dad was at Antioch College in the middle of the US, he led a protest movement called SLAM, Student League Against Mortality. They were protesting against death, wandering across the campus.”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was turning around into circle going error, error, error, error, because Spock and Kirk had tricked it into a mechanical breakdown by presenting it with a logical paradox. And I was just like, well, this makes no sense. This AI is very, very smart. It's been traveling all around the universe, but these people could trick it with a simple logical paradox. Like, if, you know, if the human brain can get beyond that paradox, why can't this AI? So I felt the screenwriters of Star Trek had misunderstood the nature of intelligence. And I complained to my dad about it, and he... He wasn't going to say anything one way or the other.”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I remember going through them, and it was all the old quantum mechanics, like Rutherford Adams and stuff. So I got to the part of wave functions, which I didn't understand, although I was very bright kid. And I realized he didn't quite understand it either, but at least like he pointed me to some professor he knew at UPenn nearby who understood these things, right? So that's an unusual opportunity for a kid to have, right? My dad, He was programming Fortran when I was 10 or 11 years old on like HP 3000 mainframes at Rutgers University. So I got to do linear regression in Fortran on punch cards when I was in middle school, right? Because he was doing, I guess, analysis of demographic and sociology data. So yes, certainly that gave me a...”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. I mean, my dad is a sociology professor who recently retired from Rutgers University. But that clearly gave me a head start in life. I mean, my grandfather gave me all this quantum mechanics books. And I was like seven or eight years old.”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Eastern European Jewish notion in my background. One of my great uncles was, I guess, conductor of San Francisco Orchestra. So there's a lot of Mickey Salkind, a bunch of music music in there also. And clearly this culture was all about learning and understanding the world and also not quite taking yourself too seriously while you do it, right? There's a lot of Yiddish humor in there. So I do appreciate that culture, although the whole idea that... The Jews are the chosen people of God never resonated with me too much.”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, yeah, very clearly. I mean, I'm not religious in a traditional sense, but clearly the Eastern European Jewish tradition was what I was raised in. I mean, my grandfather Leo Zwell was a physical chemist to work with Longus Pauling and a bunch of the other early greats in quantum mechanics. I mean, he was into x-ray diffraction. He was on the material science side, experimentalist rather than a theorist. His sister was also a physicist. My father's father, Victor Goetzel, was a PhD in psychology who had the unenviable job of giving so therapy to the Japanese in internment camps in the US in World War II, like to counsel them why they shouldn't kill themselves, even though they'd had all their stuff taken away and been imprisoned for no good reason. So, I mean, there's a lot of...”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah. Well, my ancestry is three quarters Eastern European Jewish. So I'm in my three of my great grandparents. Emigrated to New York from Lithuania and sort of border regions of Poland, which were in and out of Poland around the time of World War I. And they were... Socialists and communists, as well as Jews, mostly Menshevik, not Bolshevik, and they sort of, they fled at just the right time to the US for their own personal reasons. And then almost all, or maybe all of my extended family that remained in Eastern Europe was killed either by Hitlins or Stalin's minions at some point. So the branch of the family that emigrated to the US was pretty much the only one.”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of view on the other hand, if you look at his understanding of human nature and sort of the human mind and heart and soul, it's really unparalleled. He had an amazing view of how human beings construct a world for themselves based on their own understanding and their own mental predisposition. And I think if you look in the brothers Karamazov in particular, the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Baktin wrote about this as a polyphonic mode of fiction, which means it's not third person, but it's not first person from any one person really. There are many different characters in the novel, and each of them is sort of telling part of the story from their own point of view.”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That would probably go beyond the scope of a brief interview. But in both of those are amazing thinkers who will necessarily have a A complex relationship with, right? So, I mean, Dostoevsky on the minus side, he's kind of a religious fanatic, and he's sort of helped squash the Russian nihilist movement, which was very interesting. Because what nihilism meant originally in that period of the mid late 1800s in Russia was not taking anything fully 100% for grant. It was really more like what we'd call Bayesianism now, where you don't want to adopt anything as a dogmatic certitude and always leave your mind open and how Dostoevsky parodied nihilism was a bit different, right? He parodied as people who believe absolutely nothing. So they must assign an equal probability weight to every proposition, which doesn't really work. So on the one hand, I didn't really agree with Dostevsky on his sort of religious point.”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mentally. You can see AGI has amazing capability to do good for humans as humans alongside with its capability to go far, far beyond the human level. So, I mean, both aspects are there, which makes it even more exciting and important.”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say my motivation to create AGI comes from both of those directions, actually. So when I first became passionate about AGI, when it would have been two or three years old after watching robots on Star Trek, I mean, then it was really a combination of intellectual curiosity. Like, can a machine really think, how would you do that? And yeah, just ambition to create something much better than all the clearly limited and fundamentally defective humans I saw around me. Then as I got older and got more enmeshed in the human world and got married, had children, some of my parents began to age, I started to realize, well, not only will AGI let you go far beyond the limitations of the human, but it could also stop us from dying and suffering and feeling pain and tormenting ourselves.”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There have been various TV shows and science fiction novels positing cats, dolphins, mice, and whatnot are actually superintelligence is here to observe that. I would guess as one or the other quantum physics founders said those theories are not crazy enough to be true. The reality is probably crazier than that.”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, the older I've gotten, the more respect I've achieved for our fundamental ignorance. I mean, mine and everybody else's. I mean, I look at my two dogs, two beautiful little toy poodles, and they watch me sitting at the computer typing. They just think I'm sitting there wiggling my fingers to exercise him, maybe, or guarding the monitor on the desk that they have no idea that I'm communicating with other people halfway around the world, let alone creating complex algorithms running in RAM on some computer server in St. Petersburg or something, right? Although they're right there, they're right there in the room with me. So what things are there right around us that we're just too stupid or closed-minded to comprehend? Probably quite a lot.”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the finger is also useful and is controlled with intent by the brain. Whereas we may be much less than that, right? I mean, yeah, we may be just some. Random epiphenomenon that they don't care about too much. Like think about the shape of the crowd emanating from a sports stadium or something, right? There's some emergent shape to the crowd. It's there. You could take a picture of it. It's kind of cool. It's irrelevant to the main point of the sports event or where the people are going or what's on the minds of the people making that shape in the crowd, right? So we may just be some... Semi arbitrary higher level pattern popping out of a lower level hyperintelligent self organization. And I'm in, so be it, right? I mean, that's one thing that.”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So they're going to get smaller and smaller. But then ultimately, what does that mean? The minds of the super, super, super intelligences, they're going to be packed into the interaction of elementary particles or quarks or the partons inside quarks or whatever it is. So what we perceive as random fluctuations on the quantum or subquantum level may actually be the thoughts of the micro micro micro miniaturized superintelligences because there's no way we can tell random from structured but with an algorithmic information more complex in our brains right we can't tell the difference so what we think is random could be the thought processes of some really tiny superminds and if so there's not a damn thing we can do about it except you know try to upgrade our intelligences and expand our mind so that we can we can”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do you think their intelligences may be all around us that we're not able to even detect? So this kind of idea of maybe you can comment also on Stephen Wolfram thinking that there's computations all around us and we're just not smart enough to kind of detect their intelligence or appreciate their intelligence. Yeah. So my friend Hugo de Guerreus, who I've been talking to about these things for many decades since the early 90s, he had an idea he called SIPI, the search for intra particulate intelligence. So the concept there was as AIs get smarter and smarter and smarter, assuming the laws of physics as we know them now are still what these superintelligences perceive to hold and are bound by. As they get smarter and smarter, they're going to shrink themselves little and littler because special relativity makes”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“may be a simulation or a dream or something else we can't even comprehend but he believed in love and compassion as something persistent through the various simulated realities so those those two science fiction writers had a huge impact on me then a little older than that i got into dostevsky and fried nietze and rambaud and a bunch of uh more more literary typewriting can we talk about some of those things so on the solar side stanisof lamb uh This kind of idea of there being intelligences out there that are different than our own”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lem's books. This was engineered by people. But eventually it became very intelligent in a different direction than humans and decided that humans were kind of trivial and not that interesting. So it put some impenetrable shield around itself, shut itself off from humanity, and then issued some philosophical screed about the pathetic and hopeless nature of humanity and all human thought. and then disappeared. Now Philip K. Dick, he was a bit different. He was human focused, right? His main thing was human compassion and the human heart and soul are going to be the constant that will keep us going through whatever aliens we discover or telepathy, machines or super AIs or whatever it might be. So he didn't believe in reality like the reality that we see”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Writings on superhuman AIs that were engineered, Solaris was sort of a superhuman naturally occurring intelligence. Then Philip K Dick, who, you know, ultimately my fandom for Philip K. Dick is one of the things that brought me together with David Hansen, my collaborator on robotics project. So, you know, Stanislaem was very much an intellectual, right? So he had a very broad view of intelligence beyond the human and into what I would call open-ended superintelligence. The Solaris superintelligent ocean was intelligent in some ways more generally intelligent than people, but in a complex and confusing way so that human beings could never quite connect to it. But it was still palpably very, very smart. And then what Golem for supercomputer in one of Lem's”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now here's my conversation with Benzel. Wood books, authors, ideas had a lot of impact on you in your life in the early days. You know what got me into AI and science fiction such in the first place wasn't a book, but the original Star Trek TV show, which my dad watched with me like in its first run, it would have been 1968, 69 or something. And that was incredible because every show they visited a different alien civilization with different culture and weird mechanisms. But that got me into science fiction and there wasn't that much science fiction to watch on TV at that stage. That got me into reading the whole literature of science fiction from the beginning of the previous century until that time. I mean, there was so many science fiction writers who were inspirational to me. I'd say if I had to pick two, it would have been Stanislaw Lem, the Polish writer. Solaris, and then he had a bunch of more obscure.”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The show sponsored by Masterclass sign up at masterclass dot com slash lex to get a discount and to support this podcast. When I first heard about masterclass, I thought it was too good to be true. For one hundred eighty bucks a year, you get an all access pass to watch courses from to list some of my favorites Chris Hatfield on space exploration, Neil de Grass Tyson on scientific thinking and communication, Will Wright, creator of the greatest city building game ever some city and sims on game design Carlos Santana on guitar Garic Asparov the greatest chess player ever on chess Daniel Negrano on poker and many more Chris Hatfield explaining how rockets work and the experience of being launched into space alone is worth the money sign up a masterclass dot com slash Lex to get a discount and to support this podcast”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Calls them out when it's needed and makes the whole thing fun to listen to. His interviewed Kobe Bryant, Mark Cuban, Neil de Gras Tyson, Caracasparov, and many more. His conversation with Kobe is a reminder how much focus and hard work is acquired for greatness. In sport, business, and life. I highly recommend the episode if you want to be inspired. Again, go to Jordanhar. comes I sent you.”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“com slash lex and signing up a masterclass dot com slash lex. Click the links, buy all the stuff. It's the best way to support this podcast and the journey I'm on in my research and startup. This is the artificial intelligence podcast. If you enjoy it, subscribe by YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcast, support it on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman, spelled without the E just FRIDMAN. As usual, I'll do a few minutes of As now and never any ads in the middle that can break the flow of the conversation. This episode is supported by the Jordan Harbinger Show. Go to JordanHarbinger dot cons is how he knows I sent you. On that page there's links to subscribe to it on Apple Podcast, Spotify, and everywhere else. I've been binging on his podcast. Jordan is great. He gets the best out of his guest, dives deep.”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The following is a conversation with Ben Gertzel, one of the most interesting minds in artificial intelligence community. He is the founder of SingularityNet, designer of OpenCog AI framework, formerly a director of research at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, and she is scientist of Hansen Robotics, the company that created the Sophia robot. He has been a central figure in the AGI community for many years, including in his organizing and contributing to the conference and artificial general intelligence, the twenty twenty version of which is actually happening this week, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. It's virtual and free. I encourage you to check out the talks, including by Yosha Bach from Episode one hundred one of this podcast. Quick summary of the ads, two sponsors The Jordan Harbinger Show and Master Classing this podcast by going to Jordan Harbinger.”
2020-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #103 – Ben Goertzel: Artificial General Intelligence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source