AGI Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

To understand why the TODA/SingularityNET collaboration makes so much sense, one has to look carefully at the essential missions and architectures of the two projects, the historical contexts that produced each of them, and the futures that each are working to build

In this Podcast and series of 3 blog posts, we’re going to take a fairly deep dive — but those who bear with us till the end will be rewarded with a genuine understanding of the profound potential that SingularityNET, TODA and Todalarity, working together, have to seed the emergence of the next level of Internet intelligence. By which I mean both immediately practical, applied AI products and services — and slightly longer term, the transition from today’s narrow AI systems to powerful AGI systems resident in and emergent from the global AI network

Online information resources regarding TODA are in rapid development this fall; for now Toda.Network, TODAQ and Todalarity are the places to look.

All three parts of 'The Todalarity is Here' blog post can be found here:

The Todalarity is Here, Part One: SingularityNET / TODA Synergy at the Core of the Emerging Global Brain — Ben Goertze

http://bit.ly/Todalarity

The Todalarity is Here, Part Two: The Rapidly Expanding TODA SovTech Ecosystem —Toufi Saliba, Dann Toliver, Ben Goertze

http://bit.ly/Todalarityp2

The Todalarity is Here, Part Three: A Product Accelerator for Driving the Decentralized AI Revolution — Ben Goertzel, Toufi Saliba

http://bit.ly/Todalarity3

Since Prometheus' gift of fire to humankind, humans have been using it as a tool to adapt to their environment and ultimately adapt the environment to themselves. Yet, from contract law, to media, to the roads we create, human beings have also always been shaped by their very own tools. A set of foreseen and unforeseen consequences on the way people develop, learn, interact, or build relationships tend to manifest with ubiquitous tools. This is a rather obvious observation but an important one to make in order to contextualise the way that modern digital networked tools have affected people in the information age.

In this month’s AGI podcast, we were honored to receive and converse with Professor Brett Frischmann who recently wrote, along with his colleague Professor Evan Selinger, the book Re-Engineering Humanity joined. Much of the podcast’s discussion touches on subjects that the book covers in-depth and with a refreshing level of optimism despite the harsh reality it unveils.

The guest, Brett Frischmann, is the Charles Widger Endowed University Professor in Law, Business and Economics at Villanova University. He is also an Affiliate Scholar of the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School and a Trustee for the Nexa Center for Internet & Society in Torino, Italy. More importantly, Prof. Frischmann has researched extensively on knowledge commons, the Social Value of Shared Resources and techno-social engineering of humans (the relationships between the techno-social world and humanity). These subjects have long been core to the vision of SingularityNET and it was an exciting opportunity to discuss them with such a knowledgeable guest.

In this our second Episode we welcome our first guest to the series, Dr. Julia Mossbridge, A leading Cognitive Neuroscientist, Scholar and Author.

Julia has a Ph.D. in Communication Sciences and Disorders which she obtained from the Northwestern University. She also holds a Masters Degree in Neuroscience From the University of California San Francisco, and she received her B.A. with highest honors in neuroscience from Oberlin College in Ohio.

She is the Founder and Scientific Director of the Mossbridge Institute, a fellow Institute of Noetic Sciences, and a visiting Scholar at Northwestern University.

Dr. Mossbridge is widely published and has authored such books as ‘Transcendent Mind: Rethinking the Science of Consciousness’, and the soon to be released ‘The Premonition Code: The Science of Precognition, How Sensing the Future Can Change Your Life’

Julia also is the principle founder of ‘Loving AI’, a research project addressing how AI agents can communicate unconditional love to humans through conversations that adapt to the unique needs of each user. It is a collaboration between SingularityNET, Hanson Robotics and Lia Inc.

As always if you are interested to know more about SingularityNET or the Loving AI project, or indeed if want to find out more about any of our guests in general, please do drop us a line at info@SingularityNET.io

AGI & The Singularity - Dr. Ben Goertzel

In this inaugural episode we have the good fortune of interviewing the founder and CEO of Singularitynet, Dr. Ben Goertzel.

Having had a chance to spend quite a bit of time with Ben in Hong Kong, we were struck by not only the pace at which Ben and the team were moving the foundation forward, but also Ben’s earnest and unwavering commitment to creating a positive technological singularity.

Who is Dr. Ben Goertzel?

Dr. Ben Goertzel is the CEO and leading AI expert for SingularityNET, and chief Scientist of Hanson robotics, a Hong kong robotics company that is the creator of Sophia one of the world’s most advances humanoid robots.

Ben also serves as chairman of the artificial general intelligence society which hosts the annual AGI research conference series, its upcoming in August 2018, and the opencog foundation an organisation leading international development of advanced opensource AI tools.

Dr. Goertzel is one of the world’s foremost experts in Artificial Intelligence publishing over 141 scientific articles and 12 scientific books in the field of AI with the focus on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), and thinking machines with general cognitive capabilities of the human level and beyond.

He also has decades of expertise applying AI to practical problems in areas ranging from natural language processing and Datamining to robotics, video gaming, national security, and bio informatics.

Before relocating to HongKong in 2011 Dr. Goertzel held an executive roles AI consulting and product development firms, prior to that he served as a faculty member in mathematics at the university of Nevada las Vegas, in cognitive science at the university of western Australia, and in computer science at the Lucardo New Zealand

If we combine all the Wikipedias, there will be 27 billion words, written in 293 languages, spread across over 40 million articles.

By crowdsourcing knowledge and offering it for free over the internet, there is little doubt that Wikipedia has provided immense value to humanity. The project, unlike many others, successfully tapped into the open source spirit of the Web 1.0 and survived the onslaught of the walled gardens that sprung up as the web evolved. As the world’s most frequented encyclopedia in humanity’s history, it has achieved enviable success in its mission to democratize knowledge.

So why is Larry Sanger, the co-founder of Wikipedia, one of its harshest critics? What is his vision for a Wikipedia 2.0? And what has it got to do with the blockchain?

In the latest episode of the AGI Podcast, we asked Larry Sanger all of those questions — and more — for a fascinating and insightful conversation on knowledge marketplaces, decentralized curation, and finding the best of our knowledge.

Today’s article is about a particularly inspiring AGI Podcast revolving around decentralized efforts to achieve synoptical systems for social good, and which ties in with a new endeavor undertaken by the SingularityNET team. This week we interviewed a prominent figure in the European blockchain and AI innovation scene: Jan-Peter Doomernik. Jan-Peter is Nature 2.0’s Lead Architect and a Senior Business Developer working in one of Holland’s leading distribution service operators (DSO) Enexis Netbeheer. In the podcast, we discuss the “demystification of complexity”, the upcoming Odyssey hackathon, and the efforts that civil society, academia and industry can make to introduce new autonomous systems imbued with humanitarianism.

“In forests, you have big trees and little trees and those trees are connected like a network in which the big trees share resources of sunlight and water to the little trees so that the little trees do not have to become competitors.” — Jan-Peter Doomernik

Changing the world one system at a time: a conversation with Mark Turrell.

We were delighted to receive Mark Turrell on the AGI podcast for a fascinating and well-informed conversation on humanity, organising principles, structural tendencies and networks. Mark is a Harvard educated entrepreneur, educator, author and strategist. He has focused most of his life on understanding, solving and improving complex problems across industries and cultures. Be it from Europe, Africa or North America, Mark has helped companies scale -a topic on which he wrote a book about- and has passionately supported people and projects poised toward social good, for which he received the title of Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. Currently, he is an associate professor at Hult Business School and the CEO of both Orcasci and Vork, a strategy agency and a networking app, respectively.

If we were to end Mark’s introduction with a glimpse of his raison d’être, it would be with the following:

“My goal is to change the entire world for the better, all of it, at the same time, so that people can be happier, be less sad, and be free to choose. As a pragmatist, I develop plans and tactics to achieve this.”

We hope you enjoy listening as much as we did while interviewing Mark.

Becoming one with technology, with Zoltan Istvan

Though you can find transhumanists “by the millions” around the globe, you will not find many quite like Zoltan Istvan. His dedication to the cause of transhumanism has marked his political and public life and deserve a brief introduction.

Zoltan is one of the most vocal figures in the U.S today fighting to bring about an informed public conversation around the topic of fully integrating technology into our lives, and ultimately to kindle a transhumanist rights movement. Zoltan is the founder of the Transhumanist Party in the United States (US) for which he ran as the presidential nominee, and a journalist published by Vice’s Motherboard, Wired and Techchrunch. He is also the author of the Transhumanist Wager and the Transhumanist Bill of Rights. Recently Zoltan has given talks at the United Nations, World Economic Forum, and at the Global Innovation Forum in Armenia.