Between Ape and Artilect CreateSpace_v2 - Ben Goertzel

480 Pages·2014·3.87 MB·English

by  Ben Goertzel

Between
Ape
and
Artilect

Conversations with Pioneers
of Artificial General Intelligence
and Other Transformative
Technologies

Interviews Conducted and Edited
by Ben Goertzel
This work is offered under the following license terms:
Creative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs
3.0 Unported (CC-BY-NC-ND-3.0)
See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/
for details
Copyright © 2013 Ben Goertzel
All rights reserved.
ISBN:
ISBN-13:
“Man is a rope stretched between the
animal and the Superman – a rope over
an abyss.”
-- Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

Table&of&Contents&
Introduction ........................................................................................................ 7!
Itamar Arel: AGI via Deep Learning ................................................................. 11!
Pei Wang: What Do You Mean by “AI”? .......................................................... 23!
Joscha Bach: Understanding the Mind ........................................................... 39!
Hugo DeGaris: Will There be Cyborgs? .......................................................... 51!
DeGaris Interviews Goertzel: Seeking the Sputnik of AGI .............................. 61!
Linas Vepstas: AGI, Open Source and Our Economic Future ........................ 89!
Joel Pitt: The Benefits of Open Source for AGI ............................................ 101!
Randal Koene: Substrate-Independent Minds .............................................. 107!
João Pedro de Magalhães: Ending Aging ..................................................... 129!
Aubrey De Grey: Aging and AGI .................................................................... 149!
David Brin: Sousveillance .............................................................................. 157!
J. Storrs Hall: Intelligent Nano Factories and Fogs ....................................... 173!
Mohamad Tarifi: AGI and the Emerging Peer-to-Peer Economy ................... 187!
Michael Anissimov: The Risks of Artificial Superintelligence ........................ 203!
Muehlhauser & Goertzel: Rationality, Risk, and the Future of AGI ............... 227!
Paul Werbos: Will Humanity Survive? ........................................................... 269!
Wendell Wallach: Machine Morality ............................................................... 283!
Francis Heylighen: The Emerging Global Brain ............................................ 295!
Steve Omohundro: The Wisdom of the Global Brain and the Future of AGI 325!
Alexandra Elbakyan: Beyond the Borg .......................................................... 337!
Giulio Prisco: Technological Transcendence ................................................ 355!
Zhou Changle: Zen and the Art of Intelligent Robotics .................................. 373!
Hugo DeGaris: Is God an Alien Mathematician? .......................................... 389!
Lincoln Cannon: The Most Transhumanist Religion? ................................... 407!
Natasha Vita-More: Upgrading Humanity ...................................................... 439!
Jeffery Martin & Mikey Siegel: Engineering Enlightenment .......................... 457!
!

Introduction
The amazing scientific and technological progress that
characterizes our times, is at this stage still being directed
primarily by flesh and blood human beings. Behind every radical
scientific or technological advance or attempt, is some human
being – or team -- with their own particular idiosyncratic
perspective on their work and on the world.
Due to the various roles I’ve taken in the science, technology
and futurist communities in recent years, I have come into
contact with a remarkable variety of intriguing, transformational
scientists, engineers and visionaries – people bringing their own
individual, often wonderfully quirky perspectives to their work on
revolutionary technologies and related concepts. I have
dialogued with these pathbreaking people in various ways and
contexts: face to face and on line, in groups and individually, in
highly focused settings or over lunch or beer or while hiking in
the mountains, etc.
In late 2010 I decided it would be interesting to formalize some of
my ongoing dialogues with various interesting researchers, in the
form of interviews/dialogues to be published in H+ Magazine, an
online transhumanist magazine for which I have off-and-on
written and/or edited since 2008. So I conducted a variety of
such dialogues, mostly in late 2010 and early 2011 but
continuing into 2012. What I did was to email each of my
subjects a list of questions, get their responses via email, then
reply to their responses, and so forth -- and then, finally, edit the
results into a coherent linear dialogue. The resulting dialogues
were well received when posted on the H+ Magazine website;
and I eventually decided they have enough lasting value that it
makes sense to collect them all into a book.
The most central focus of the dialogues in the book is Artificial
General Intelligence (AGI) – the quest to make software or
hardware with the same sort of thinking power as humans, and
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Between Ape and Artilect
ultimately a lot more. Between half and two thirds of the
chapters are focused in some way on AGI. But there’s also
plenty of variation from this focus: a couple chapters on life
extension research, a chapter on sousveillance, one on
nanotech, some chapters on the Global Brain and on
transhumanist spirituality. AGI does rear its head now and then
even in the chapters that don’t focus on it, though. One of the
exciting and sometimes mind-boggling characteristics of the
current revolution in science and technology, is the way all the
different branches of inquiry seem to be melding together into
one bold, complex quest to understand and reshape the
universe.
The online H+ Magazine versions of the dialogues, in some
cases, have nice pictures that didn’t make it into this book
version. You may look the articles up online if you’re curious!
However, the book format has a different flavor: it puts all the
dialogues together, allowing synergies between the different
perspectives to be readily perceived; and it nudges the reader
more toward thoughtful cogitation on the themes discussed,
whereas Web pages tend more to encourage quick-and-dirty
skimming.
Some of the material in some of the dialogues is already a bit
dated – in some areas of science, a couple years is a long time!
But I haven’t updated or otherwise changed any of the material
in the dialogues from the original H+ Magazine versions, except
for formatting adjustments. On the other hand, I have more
significantly tweaked the introductory prose prior to the start of
some of the dialogues. The information about interviewees’
careers and affiliations has been updated so as to be correct as
of January 2013; and introductory information that was
appropriate for the magazine but not for a book has been
removed.
Only a few of the pieces given here have the flavor of classical
“interviews” – in most cases they are more like “dialogues”,
meaning that I inject a lot of my own ideas and opinions. Except
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Introduction
in the case of Hugo de Garis’s interview of me (the “AGI Sputnik”
dialogue given here), the focus is on the ideas of the other
person I’m interviewing. But the feel in most cases is more of a
wide-ranging conversation between friends/colleagues, rather
than a reporter interviewing a subject. This is both because I like
to talk too much, and because unlike most reporters, I myself
happen to have a deep scientific expertise in the research areas
being pursued by the subject.
In spite of the conversational nature of the material, this is not
exactly “light reading” – the lay reader with no background in the
various areas of science and technology being discussed, is
bound to get lost here and there. However, it’s certainly not
technical material either. The discussion is kept at the level one
might hear in a panel discussion at a non-technical technology-
oriented conference like a Singularity Summit, Humanity+
conference or TEDx. If you like the idea of listening in on
conversations between scientists and engineers talking about
their work and their ideas, then this book is definitely for you!
The ideas discussed in these pages are not only a lot of fun to
think about and work on, they are also among the most important
things happening on the planet at this point in time.
Furthermore, they are ideas that nobody understands all that
thoroughly – in spite of their importance, and the relative speed
at which they are transitioning from idea into reality. I think it’s
important that we foster a diversity of voices on these topics, and
that folks with different opinions make every effort to understand
each other and absorb each other’s ideas. That is the spirit in
which these dialogues were conducted, and in which I’m now
presenting them to you in book form.
The title “Between Ape and Artilect” was chosen to reflect the
transitional nature of our times. We are creatures of flesh and
blood, on the verge of engineering creatures made from a much
wider variety of substances, and of transmogrifying ourselves
into all sorts of novel forms. We carry minds and bodies that are
largely the same as those of apes; yet we are able to conceive,
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