Dr. Ben Goertzel

00:06boom hello ben hey there good to see you man yeah it's a pleasure to be here thanks for doing this yeah yeah thank thanks thanks for having me i've been i've been looking at some of your shows in the last few last few days just to to get a sense of how you're thinking about ai and crypto and the various other things i'm involved in it's been interesting well i've been following you as well i've been uh paying attention to a lot of your lectures and talks and different things you've done over the last couple days as well getting ready for this it's uh ai is uh either people are really excited about it or they're really terrified of it those are the sort of it seems to be the two responses either people have this dismal view of these robots taking over the world or they think it's going to be some amazing sort of symbiotic relationship that we have with these things it's going to evolve

00:56human beings past the the monkey stage that we're at right now yeah and i i tend to be on the lather more positive side of this dichotomy but i think one thing that has struck me in recent years is many people are now you know mentally confronting all the issues running ai for the first time and i i mean i've been working on ai for three decades and i first started thinking about ai when i was a little kid in the early late 60s and early 70s when i saw ais and robots on the original star trek so i guess i've had a lot of cycles to process the positives and and negatives of it whereas now like suddenly most of the world is thinking through all this for the first for the first time and you know when you first wrap your brain around the idea that there may be creatures 10 000 or a million times smarter than human beings at first this is a bit of a shocker

01:57right and then i mean it takes a while to internalize this in your worldview well it's that there's also i think there's a problem with the term artificial intelligence because it's it's it's intelligent it's there it's a real thing yeah it's not artificial it's not like a fake diamond or a fake ferrari it's a real thing and it it's not a great term and there's been many attempts to replace it with synthetic intelligence for for example right but for better or worse like ai is there it's part of the popular imagination it seems it's an imperfect word but it's it's not going away well i i my question is like are we married to this idea of intelligence and of life being biological being carbon-based tissue and cells and blood and or insects or mammals or fish or are we married to that too much do you think that it's entirely possible that what human beings are doing and what

02:59people that are at the tip of a.i right now that are really pushing the technology what they're doing is really creating a new life form that it's it's going to be a new thing that just the same way we recognize wasps and buffaloes and artificial intelligence is just going to be a life form that emerges from the creativity and ingenuity of human beings well in indeed so i mean i've long been uh an advocate of a philosophy i think of as as patternism like it's the pattern of organization that appears to be the the critical thing and the min the you know the individual cells and going down further like the molecules and particles in our body are are turning over all the time so it's not the specific combination of elementary particles which makes me who i am or makes you who you are it's a pattern by which they're organized and the patterns by which they change

03:55over time so i mean if we can create digital systems or quantum computers or femto computers or whatever it is manifesting the patterns of organization that constitute intelligence i mean then then there you are there there's intelligence right so that that's not to say that you know consciousness and experience is just about patterns of organization there may be more dimensions to it but when when you look at what constitutes intelligence thinking cognition problem solving you know it's the pattern of organization not not the specific material as as as far as we can tell so we can see no reason based on all the science that we know so far that you couldn't make an intelligent system out of some other form of matter rather than the specific types of atoms and molecules that that make up human beings and it seems that we're we're well on the way to being able to do so when you're studying

04:53when you're studying intelligence you're studying artificial intelligence did you spend any time studying the patterns that insects seem to cooperatively behave with like how leaf cutter ants build these elaborate structures underground and you know wasps build these giant colonies and did you study how i did actually yes so i i i sort of grew up with the philosophy of complex systems which was championed by the by the santa fe institute in in the 1980s and the whole concept that there is an interdisciplinary complex system science which includes you know biology cosmology psychology sociology they're sort of universal patterns of of self-organization and you know ants and ant colonies have long been a paradigm case for that and i i i used to play with the ant colonies in my backyard when when i was a kid and you'd lay down food in certain patterns you'd see how

05:56their ants are laying down pheromones and the colonies are organizing in in a certain way and that's an interesting self-organizing complex system on its own it's lacking some types of adaptive intelligence that that human mind and human societies have but but it has also interesting self-organizing patterns this reminds me of the novel solaris by stanislaw which was published in in the 60s which was really quite quite a deep novel much deeper than the the movie that was made of it did you ever read the books hilarious so what i'm not familiar with the movie either who who's um well so there was an amazing brilliant movie by tarkovsky the russian director from the late 60s then there was a movie by steven soderbergh which was sort of glammed up and americanized and that was fairly recent right yeah 10 years ago but that that wasn't didn't get all the deep points of the novel the original

06:53novel in essence there's this there's this ocean coating the surface of some alien planet which has amazingly complex fractal patterns of organization and it's also interactive like the patterns of organization on the ocean respond based on on what you do and when people get near the ocean it causes them to hallucinate things and even causes them to see simulacra of people from their past even the like the person who they had most harmed or injured in their past appears and interacts with them so clearly this ocean has some type of amazing complexity and intelligence from the patterns it displays and from the weird things it reeks in your mind so that the people on earth try to understand how the ocean is thinking they send a scientific expedition there to to interact with that ocean but it's just so alien even though it monkeys with people's minds and clearly is doing complex things

07:54no two-way communication is ever is ever established and eventually the the human expedition gives up and goes home so it's a very russian ending to the novel uh uh i i guess it's not i think i saw that but the the the interest the interesting message there is i mean there can be many many kinds of intelligence right i mean human intelligence is one thing the intelligence of an ant colony is a different thing the intelligence of human society is a different thing ecosystem is a different thing and there could be many many types of ais that we could build with many many different properties some could be wonderful to human beings some could be horrible to human beings some could just be alien minds that that we can't even relate relate to very very well so we we have a very limited conception of what an intelligence is if we just think by close analogy to to human minds and this

09:00this is important if you're thinking about engineering or growing artificial life forms or artificial minds because it's not just can we do this it's what kind of mind are are we going to engineer or evolve and there's there's a huge spectrum of possibilities yeah that's one of the reasons why i asked you if we'd created if human beings had created some sort of an insect and this insect started organizing and developing these complex colonies like a leaf cutter ant and building these structures underground people would go crazy they would panic they would think these things are organizing they're gonna they're gonna build up their resources and attack us they're gonna try to take over humanity i mean this what what people are worried about more than anything when it comes to technology i think is the idea that we're going to be irrelevant that we're going to be uh

09:51antiques and that something new and better is going to take our place which is which is almost inevitable yeah it's a weird thing to worry about because it's sort of the history of biological life on earth i mean what we know is there's complex things they become more complicated with single-celled organisms to multi-celled organisms there seems to be a pattern leading up to us and us with this unprecedented ability to change our environment that's what we can do right we can manipulate things poison the environment we can blow up entire countries with bombs if we'd like to and we can also do wild creative things like send signals through space and land on someone else's phone on the other side of the world almost instantaneously we have incredible power but we're also we're also so limited by our biology yeah the thing i think people are afraid of and i i'm afraid of but i don't know

10:40if it makes any sense is that the next level of life whatever artificial life is or whatever the the the human symbiote is that it's going to lack emotions it's going to lack desires and needs and all the things that we think are special about us our creativity our desire for attention and love all of our camaraderie all these different things that are sort of programmed into us with with our genetics in order to advance our species that we we we're so connected to these things but they're so they're the reason for war they're the reason for the lies deception thievery there's so many things that are built into being a person that are responsible for all the woes of humanity but we're afraid to lose those yeah i think it it's almost inevitable by this point that humanity is going to create synthetic intelligences with tremendously greater general intelligence and practical capability

11:46than human beings have i mean i think i know how to do that with the software i'm working on with my own team but if we fail you know there's a load of other teams who i think are a bit behind us but they're going in the same direction though right you guys feel like you're at the tip of the spear with this stuff i do but i also think that's not the most important thing from a human perspective the most important thing is that humanity as a whole is quite close to this this threshold event right so how far do you think it's quite close by my own gut feeling five to thirty years let's say that's pretty close but if i'm wrong and it's a hundred years like in the historical time scale that sort of doesn't matter it's like did the sumerians create civilization 10 000 or 10 050 years ago like what difference does it make right so i think we're quite close to creating

12:38superhuman artificial general intelligence and that's in a way almost inevitable given where we are now on the other hand i think we still have some agency regarding whether this comes out in a way that you know respects human values and culture which are important to us now given who and what we are yeah or that is essentially indifferent to human values and and culture in the same way that we're mostly indifferent to chimpanzee values and and culture at that at this point and being completely indifferent to insect values and culture not completely if you think about it i mean if i'm building a new house i will bulldoze a bunch of ants but yet we get upset if we extinct an insect species right so we we care we care to some level but not but we but we would like the super ais to care about us more than we care about insects or or great age absolutely right and i think this

13:42this is something we can impact right now and to to to be honest i mean in a certain part of my mind i can think well like in in the end i don't matter that much my four kids don't matter that much my granddaughter doesn't matter that much like we are patterns of organization in a very long lineage of patterns of organization and they matter very much to you yeah and other you know dinosaurs came and went and neanderthals came and went humans may come and go the ais that we create may come and go and that's the nature of the universe but on the other hand of course in my heart from my situated perspective as an individual human like if if some ai tried to annihilate my my 10 month old son that would try to kill that ai right like so as as a human being situated in this specific you know species place and time i care a lot about the condition of all of us humans and so i i

14:47would like to not only create a powerful general intelligence but but create one which which is is going to be beneficial to humans and and other life forms on on the planet even while in some ways going going beyond everything that that we are right and there can't be any guarantees about something like this on the other hand humanity has really never had any guarantees about anything anyway right i mean since since since we created civilization we've been leaping into the unknown one time after the other in in a somewhat conscious and self-aware way about it from you know agriculture to language to math to the industrial revolution we're leaping into the unknown all the time which is part of why we're where we are today instead of just another animal species right so we can't have a guarantee that agis artificial general intelligences we create are going to do what we consider the

15:54right thing given our current value systems on the other hand i suspect we can bias the odds in the favor of human values and and culture and that's something i've i've put a lot of thought and work into alongside the you know the basic algorithms of artificial cognition is the issue that the initial creation would be subject to our programming but that it could perhaps program something more efficient and design something like if you build creativity into artificial general and you have to i mean general generalization is about creativity right yeah but is the issue that it would choose to not accept our values which it might find clearly we'll choose not to accept our values and we want to choose not to accept all of our values so it's more a matter of whether the ongoing creation evolution of new values occurs with some continuity and respect for the previous one so i mean i with i

16:57have four human kids now one is a baby but the other three are adults right and with each of them i took the approach of trying to teach the kids what my values were not just by preaching at them by entering with them into shared situations but then you know when your kids grow up they're going to go in their own different directions right and these are humans but but they all have the same sort of biological needs which is one of the reasons why we have these things right but the first place yeah there still is an analogy i think the ais that we create you can think of as our mind children and we're starting them off with our culture and values if we do it properly or at least with a certain subset of the whole diverse self-contradictory mess of human culture and values but you know they're going to evolve in a different direction but you want that evolution to take place

17:54in a reflective and and caring way rather than the heedless way because if if you think about it the average human a thousand years ago or even 50 years ago would have thought you and me were like hopelessly immoral miscreants who would abandon all the valuable things in life right because of your hat i haven't gone to church uh ever i i i guess i mean my my mother's lesbian right i mean there's all these things that we take for granted now that not that long ago were completely against what most humans considered maybe the most important values of life so i mean human values itself is completely a moving a moving target right and moving in our generation yeah yeah yeah moving in our generation pretty radically very radically when i think back like to my childhood i i lived in new jersey for nine years of my childhood and just the level of racism and anti-semitism

19:01and sexism that were just ambient and taken for granted then what was this was this when you're between because we're i think we're the same age we're both 51. yeah yeah yeah more than 66. i lived in jersey from 73 to 82. okay so i was there from 67 to 73. oh yeah yeah all right right so yeah i'm in like my i mean my sister went to the high school prom with a with a black guy and so we got our car turned upside down the windows of our house smashed in it was like a humongous thing and it's almost unbelievable now right because now no one would care care whatsoever it's it's it's it's just it's just life right yeah well certainly there's some fringe parts of this cup yeah yeah but but still the point is there is no fixed list of of values human values it's an ongoing evolving process and what you want is for the evolution of the ai's values to be coupled closely with the evolution of

20:06human values rather than going off in some utterly different direction that we can't even understand but this is literally playing god right i mean if you're talking about like trying to program in values i don't think you can program in values that fully you can program in a system for learning and growing values and here again the analog analogy with human kids is not hopeless like telling telling your kids these are the 10 things that are important doesn't work that well right what what works better is you enter into shared situations with them they see how you deal with the situations you guide them in dealing with real situations and that forms their system of values and this is what needs to happen with ais they need to grow up entering into real life situations with human beings so that the real life patterns of human values which are worth a lot more than the the homilies that

21:07that we enunciate formally right the real life pattern of human values gets inculcated like into the intellectual dna of the ai systems and this is part of what worries me about the way the ai field is going at this moment because i mean most of the really powerful narrow ais on the planet now are involved with like selling people's stuff they don't need spying on people or like figuring out who should be killed or otherwise abused by some government right so if if the early stage ais that we build turn into general intelligences gradually and these general intelligences are you know spy agents and advertising agents then like what what what mindset do these early stage ais have as they grow up right if they don't have any problem morally and ethically with manipulating us which we're very malleable right we're so easy to manipulate well and that we're teaching them

22:05we're teaching them to manipulate people and we're rewarding them for doing it successfully right so this is this is one of these things that from the outside point of view might not seem to be all that intelligent it's sort of like gun laws in the u.s living in hong kong i mean most people don't have a bunch of guns sitting around their house and coincidentally there there are not that many random shootings happening in hong kong right that's crazy so yeah you look in the uk yeah you look in the u.s it's like somehow you have laws that allow random lunatics to buy all the guns they want and you have all these people getting shot so similarly like from the outside you could look at it like this species is creating the success or intelligence and almost all the resources going into creating their success or intelligence are going into making ais to do surveillance like

23:07military drones and advertising agents that bring wash people into buying crap they don't need now what do you think what's wrong with this picture but isn't that just because that's where the money is like this is the this is the introduction to it and then from then we'll find other uses and applications for it but like right now that's where there's the thing is there's a lot of other applications financial app financially viable applications well yeah the applications that are getting the most attention are the financial lowest hanging fruit right so for for example among many projects i'm doing with my my singularitynet team we're looking at applying ai to you know diagnose agricultural disease so you can you can look at images of plant leaves you can look at data from the soil and atmosphere and you can project whether disease in a plant is likely to progress

23:57badly or not which tells you do you need medicine for the plant do you need pesticides now this this is an interesting area of application it's probably quite financially lucrative in a way but it's a more complex industry than than selling stuff online so the fraction of resources going into ai for agriculture is very small than like uh e-commerce or something right very specific aspect of agriculture too predicting diseases yeah yeah but there's there's a lot of specific aspects right so i mean ai for medicine again there's been papers on machine learning applied to medicine since the 80s and 90s but the amount of effort going into that compared to advertising or surveillance is very small now this has to do with the structure of the pharmaceutical business as as compared to the structure of the tech business so you know when you look into it there's there's there's

24:52good reasons there's good reasons for for everything right but nevertheless the way things are coming out coming down right now is certain biases to the development of early stage ais are are very market and then you could you could you could see them and i mean i'm trying to do something about that together with my colleagues in in in singularity that but of course we're sort of it's sort of a david versus goliath thing it seemed well of course you're trying to do something different and i think it's awesome what you guys are doing but it just makes sense to me that the first applications are going to be the ones that are more financially viable it's like well the first applications were military right i mean until about 10 years ago 85 of all funding in the ai was from u.s plus plus western europe militaries well what i'm getting at is that it seems that

25:48money and and commerce are inexorably linked to innovation and technology because there's this sort of thing that we do as a culture where we're constantly trying to buy and purchase bigger and better things we always want the newest iphone the greatest you know laptop we don't want the coolest electric cars whatever whatever it is and this fuels innovation this this desire for new greater things materialism in a lot of ways fuels innovation because this is how it does but i think there's an argument that as we approach a technological singularity we need new systems because if you look at how things have happened during the last century what's happened is that governments have funded most of the core innovation i mean this is well known that like most of the technology inside a smartphone was funded by u.s government a little by european government gps and the batteries and everything

26:47and then companies scaled it up they made it user friendly they decreased cost of manufacturing and this process occurs with a certain time cycle to where like government spends decades funding core innovation and universities and then industry spends decades figuring out how to scale it up and make it palatable to to users and you know this matured probably since world war ii the the this sort of modality for technology development but now that things are developing faster and faster and faster there's sort of not time for for that cycle to occur where the government and universities incubate new ideas for a while and then technology scales it up so the genie's out of the bottle essentially yeah but we still need a lot of new amazing creative innovation to happen but somehow our other new new structures are going to have to evolve to to make it happen and you can see

27:46everyone's struggling to figure out what these are so i mean this is why you have i mean you have big companies embracing open source google releases tensorflow and there's a lot of a lot of other different things and i think i think some projects in the cryptocurrency world have been looking at that too like how do we use tokens to incentivize you know independent scientists and and inventors to to do new stuff without them offering to be in the government research lab or in a big company so i think we're going to need the evolution of new systems of innovation and of technology transfer as things are are developing faster and faster and faster and this is another thing that sort of got me interested in the whole decentralized world and the blockchain world is the promise of new modes of economic and social organization that can you know bring more of the

28:40world into the research process and accelerate the technology transfer process i definitely want to talk about that but one of the things that i wanted to ask you is when when you're discussing this well i think what you're saying is one very important point that we need to move past the military gatekeepers of technology right not just military though though it's it's big tech which are advertising agencies in facebook social media things that are constantly predicting your next purchase right yeah because if you think if you think about it and i mean even in a semi-democracy like like we have in the us i mean those who control the brainwashing of the public in essence control who who votes for what and who controls the brainwashing of the public is advertising agencies and who increasingly are the biggest advertising agencies are are the big tech companies who are

29:36accumulating everybody's data and using it to to program their minds to buy things so this is what's programming the global brain of of of the human race and of course there are close links between big tech and and the military like look amazon has what 25 000 person headquarters in crystal city virginia right next to the pentagon and yeah i mean china it's even more direct and unapologetic right so it's a new like military industrial advertising complex which is is guiding the evolution of the global brain on on the planet we found that with this past election right with uh all the intrusion by foreign entities trying to influence the election that they've these giant houses set up to write bad stories about whoever they don't want to be in office yeah in a way that's almost a red herring but it i mean the russian stuff is almost a red herring but it revealed what the processes

30:39are which are used to program oh because i think the whatever programming of americans minds is done by the russians is minuscule compared to the programming of americans minds by by the americans yeah american corporate and government elite right so it's fascinating that anybody's even jumping in as well as yeah sure it's it's it's it's it's interesting and if you look at what's happening in china that's like yeah yeah yeah they're they're way better at it than that than we are well it's much more horrific right and as well it's more it's more professional it's more polished it's more centralized yeah on the other hand for almost everyone in china china is a very good place to live and you know the level of improvement in that country in the last 30 years has just been astounding right like i mean you can't you can't argue with how much better it's gotten there since then

31:38took over it's it's tremendous because they're not they embraced capitalism to a certain extent they've created their own unique system what labels you give it is is almost arbitrary they they've created their own unique system as a you know crazy hippie libertarian a narco socialist freedom maniac that system rubs against migraine in many ways on the other hand empirically if you look at it it's improved the well-being of a of a tremendous number of of people so hopefully it evolves and it's one step but the way it's evolving now is not in a more positive way freedom love well it's not in a more freedom-loving and anarchic direction one would say it's positive in some ways and negative in others like most complex things in hong kong why do you live there um i fell in love with a chinese woman there you go she's afraid she has a great reason we had a baby recently she

32:38she's not from hong kong she's from mainland china i met her when she was doing her phd in in computational linguistics in xiamen but that that was what sort of first got me to spend a lot of time in in china but then i was doing some research at hong kong polytechnic university and then my good friend david hansen was visiting me in hong kong i introduced him to some investors there which ended up with him bringing his company hanson robotics to hong kong so now after i moved there because of of falling in love with the rating then i brought my friend david there then hanson robotics grew up there and there's actually a good reason for hansen robotics to be there because i'm in the best place in the world to manufacture complex electronics is in you know shenzhen right across the border from hong kong so now i've i've been working there with hanson robotics

33:30on the sofia robots and other robots for for for a while and i've accumulated the whole ai team there around hanson robotics and singularity net so i mean by by now i'm there because my whole ai and robotics teams are there all right makes sense um do you follow uh the the state department's recommendations to not use huawei devices and they believe that they're well no you've heard that yeah pay attention to that i mean that their chinese are spying on us you know i'm sure you know when i lived i lived in washington dc for nine years i did a bunch of consulting for various government agencies there and my wife is a communist party member actually well just because she joined in high school when it was sort of uh suggested for her to join so i'm i'm sure i'm being watched by multiple governments it doesn't i don't have any secrets it doesn't really matter i'm i'm not in

34:27the business of trying to overthrow any government i'm i'm in the business of trying to bypass traditional governments and traditional monetary systems and all the rest by creating new methods of organization of people and information i understand that with you personally but it is unusual if the government is actually spying on people through these devices i doubt it's unusual at all i mean i i i i mean without going into too much detail like when i was in dc working with various government agencies it became clear there is tremendously more information obtained by government agencies than most people realize this was this was true way before snowden and wikileaks and all these revelations and what is publicly understood now is probably not the full scope of of the information that governments have either so i mean privacy is is pretty much dead and david

35:29brynn do you know david bryn no you should definitely interview david burns he's an amazing guy but he's a well-known science fiction writer he's based in southern california actually san diego but he wrote a book in oh years ago called the transparent society where he said there's two possibilities surveillance and surveillance it's like the power elite watching everyone or everyone watching everyone i think everyone watching everyone well yeah but he so he articulated this as the only essentially the only two viable possibilities and he's like we should be choosing and then creating which of these alternatives we want so now now the world is starting to understand what he was talking about back when he wrote that book what did you read you write the book oh i can't remember i mean it was well more than a decade ago it's weird when some people just nail it on the

36:20head decades in advance i mean most of the things that are happening in the world now were foreseen by stanislaw the polar shelter i mentioned valentin terchin a friend of mine who was the founder of russian ai he wrote a book called the phenomenon of science in the late 60s and you know in 1971 or two when i was a little kid i read a book called the the prometheus project by a princeton physicist called jaron gerald feinberg you read a physicist book when you're five years old yeah i started reading when i was two and my grandfather was a physicist so he i was reading a lot of stuff then but he feinberg in this book he said you know within the next few decades humanity is going to create nanotechnology it's going to create machines smarter than people and it's going to create the technology to allow human biological immortality and the question will be do

37:12we want to use these technologies you know to promote rampant consumerism or do we want to use these technologies to promote you know spiritual growth of our of our consciousness into new dimensions of experience and what fondberg proposed in this book in the late 60s which i read in the early 70s he proposed the un should send a task force out to go to everywhere in the world every little african village and educate the world about nanotech life extension and agi and get the whole world to vote on whether we should develop these technologies toward consumerism or toward consciousness expansion so i read this from a little kid it's like this is almost obvious this makes total sense like why why doesn't everyone understand this then i tried to explain this to people and i'm like oh i guess it's gonna be a while till the world catches on so so i instead decided i should build a spacecraft

38:11go away from the world at rapid speed and come back after like a million years or something when the world was far more advanced so or covered in dust yeah right so now well then you go away another million years there's something about what aliens have evolved so now pretty much the world agrees that life extension agi and nanotechnology are plausible things that may come about in the near future the same question is is there that that that feinberg saw like 50 years ago right the same question is there like do we develop this for rampant consumerism or or do we develop this for amazing new dimensions of you know consciousness expansion and mental growth but the un is not in fact educating the world about this and and pulling them to decide democratically what to do on on the other hand there's the possibility that by bypassing governments in the u.n and

39:13doing something decentralized you can create a democratic framework you know within which you know a broad swath of the world can be involved in a participatory way in guiding the the direction of these advances do you think that it's possible that instead of choosing that we're just going to have multiple directions that it's growing in that there's going to be consumer base there will be multiple directions and it's that that's inevitable it's more a matter of whether anything besides the military advertising complex gets a shake right right so i mean if you look in the software development world open source is is an amazing thing right linux is awesome and it's led to so much ai being open open source now now open source didn't have to actually take over the entire software world like richard stallman wanted in order to have a huge impact right it's

40:08enough that it's a major force so i mean it's a very hippie concept isn't it open source in a lot of ways in a way but but yet ibm ibm has probably thousands of people working on linux right so like apple it began as a hippie concept but it became very practical right so i mean something like 75 of all the servers running the internet are based in linux you know the vast majority of mobile phone os is is is linux right so this is the vast majority being uh why android is linux yeah yeah so i mean this hippie crazy thing where no one owns the code it didn't have to overtake the whole software economy and become everything to become highly valuable and then inject a different dimension into things and i i think this the same is true with decentralized ai which we're looking at with singularity like it doesn't we don't have to actually put google and and the us and chinese military intent

41:11out of business right although if that happens that that's that's fine but but we it's enough that we become an extremely major player in that ecosystem so that this you know participatory and benefit-oriented aspect becomes a really significant component of how humanity is is developing general intelligence well it's accepted generally accepted that human beings will consistently and constantly innovate right it just seems to be characteristics that that we have yep why do you think that is and what do you think that especially when in terms of creating something like artificial intelligence like why build our successors like why why do that like what is what is it about us that makes us want to constantly make bigger better things well that's a interesting question in the history of biology which i may not be the most qualified person to answer it is an

42:14interesting question and i think it has something to do with the weird way in which we embody various contradictions that we're always trying to resolve like we you mentioned ants and ants are social animals right whereas like cats are very individual we're like trapped between the two right like we're we're somewhat individual and and somewhat social and and then and then since we created civilization it's it's it's even worse because i mean i mean we have certain aspects which are which are wanting to conform with the group and the tribe and others which are wanting to innovate and break out of that and we're sort of trapped in these biological and cultural contradictions which tend to drive innovation but i think there's a lot there that no one understands in the roots of the human psyche evolutionarily but as an empirical fact what you said is is is is very true right like we we're

43:12driven to seek novelty we're driven to create new things and this is one of the factors which is driving the creation of ai i don't think that alone would make the creation of ai inevitable but why is that why don't you think it would make it inevitable if we consistently innovate and it's always been a concept i mean you were talking about the concept existing 30 plus years ago well i think a key point is that there's tremendous practical economic advantage and status advantage to be gotten from ai right now and this is driving the advancement of ai right to be incredibly rapid right because there are some things that are interesting and would use a lot of human innovation but they get very few resources so for example my my oldest son zarathustra he's doing his pg now what is his name zarathustra whoa my kids are zarathustra amadeus zebilan ulysses shaharazad and then uh

44:18the new one is corksy qrxi which is an acronym for quantum organized rational expanding intelligence i was never happy with ben it's a very boring name so yeah i i had to i had i had to do something more interesting is doing his phd on application of machine learning to automated theorem proving basically make ai's that can do mathematics better and to me that's like the most important thing we could be applying ai to because you know mathematics is the key to all modern science and engineering my phd was in math originally but the amount of resources going into ai for automating mathematics is not large at this present moment although that's a beautiful and amazing area for invention and innovation and creativity so i think what's driving our rapid push toward building ai i mean it's not just our creative drive it's the fact there's tremendous economic value

45:19military value and human value i mean curing diseases teaching kids there's tremendous value in almost everything that's important to human beings in building ai right so you put that together with our drive to create and innovate and this becomes an almost unstoppable force within within human society and what we've seen in the last you know three to five years is suddenly you know national leaders and titans of industry and even like pop stars right they've woken up to the concept that wow smarter and smarter ai is real and this is going to get better and better like within years to decades not centuries to to millennia so now the cat's out of the bag nobody's going to put it back and it's about you know how can we direct it in the most beneficial possible way and as you say it doesn't have to be just one possible way right like what what i look forward to personally

46:18is bifurcating myself into an array of possible bends like i'd like to let one copy of me fuse itself with a superhuman ai mind and you know but become become a a god or something beyond the god yeah and i wouldn't even be myself god i wouldn't even be myself anymore right i mean you would lose all concepts of human self and identity but what would be the point of even holding any of it yeah well that's that's for the future that's for the mega bend to decide megabytes yeah yeah on the other hand i'd like to let one of me remain in human form you know get get rid of death and disease and the psychological issues and and just live live happily forever you know in in the people's zoo watched over by the machines of love and grace right so i mean you can have it doesn't have to be either or because once you can scan your brain and body and 3d print new copies of yourself you

47:13could have multiple views resource hog i mean that's there's a lot of mass energy in the universe in the universe okay that's assuming that we can escape this planet because if you if you're talking about people if you're going to make themselves could you live in a world with a billion donald trumps because like literally what that's what we're talking about we're talking about trump right but wealthy people being able to reproduce themselves and just having this idea that they would like their ego to exist in multiple different forms whether it's some super symbiote form that's connected to artificial intelligence or some biological form that's immortal or some other form that's stands just as a normal human being as we know it in 2018 if you have multiple versions of yourself over and over and over again like that that's where well once you get once you get to

48:01the point where you have a superhuman general intelligence that can do things like fully scan the human brain and body and 3d print more of them by that point you're at a level where scarcity of material resources is not an issue at the human scale of doing things so uh scarcity of human resources in terms of what the scarcity of mass energy scarcity of molecules to print more copies of yourself i think that i think that's not going to be the the issue with that what people are worried about is environmental concerns of overpopulation because people are worried about what they see in front of their faces right now but people are not most people are not thinking deeply enough about what potential would be there once you had superhuman ai's doing the calculation the manufacturing and and the thinking i mean i mean the the amount of energy in the single grain of

48:59send if you had an ai able to to appropriately leverage that that energy is is tremendously more than than most than most people think and the amount of computing power in a grain of sand is like a quadrillion times all the people on on earth put together so i mean what do you mean by that the amount of computing power in the grain of sand there's well the amount of computing power that could be achieved potentially by reorganizing the elementary particles in the grain of sand yeah there there's there's a number in physics called the beekenstein bound which is the maximum amount of information that that can be can be stored in a certain amount of mass energy so that that if the laws of physics as we know them now are correct which they certainly aren't then that would be the amount of computing you can do in a certain amount of mass energy we're very very far from that

49:51limit right now right so i mean my point is once you have something a thousand times smarter than people what we imagine to be the limits now doesn't matter too much all of the issues that we're dealing with in terms of environmental concerns that could all potentially be almost certainly going to be irrelevant there may be other problem issues that we can't even conceive at this moment of course but the intelligence would be so vastly superior to what we have currently that they'll be able to find solutions to virtually every single problem that's right fukushima uh ocean fish depopulation all that stuff just arrangements of molecules man yeah whoa freaking me out but i don't want to hear that though environmental people don't want to hear that well i mean i i'm also on an everyday life basis like until we have these super ais i don't like the garbage washing up on

50:44the beach near my house either right so i mean but on an everyday basis of course we want to promote health in our bodies and in our in our environments right now as long as there's you know measurable uncertainty regarding when the benevolent super ais will will come about still i think the main question isn't whether once you have a beneficially disposed super ai it could solve all our current petty little problems the question is you know can we wade through you know the mock of modern human society and psychology to create this beneficial super ai in in in the first place like i i believe i know how to create a beneficial super ai but it's a lot of a lot of work to get there and of course there's many teams around the world working on vaguely similar projects now and it's not obvious what kind of super ai we're actually going to get once we get

51:45there yeah it's all just guesses at this point right more or less educated guesses depending on who's doing the guessing would you say that it's almost like we're in a race of the the primitive primate biology versus the potentially beneficial and benevolent artificial intelligence that this the best aspects of this primate can create that it's almost a race to get who's going to win is it the war mongers and the the greedy that are smashing the world under its boots or is it the scientists that are going to figure out some super intelligent way to solve all of our problems i look at it more as i look at it more as a as a struggle between different modes of social organization than individual people i mean like when i worked in dc with intelligence agencies most of the people i met there were really nice human beings who believed they were doing the best for the world

52:45even if some of the things that we're doing like i i thought were very much not for the best of the world right so i mean military mode of organization or large corporations as a mode of organization are in my view not generally going to lead to beneficial outcomes for the overall species and and then for the global brain and the scientific community the open source community i think are better modes of organization and you know the the better aspects of the blockchain and crypto community have have a better mode of organization so i think if if this sort of open decentralized mode of organization can marshal more resources as opposed to this centralized authoritarian mode of organization then i think things are going to come out for the better and it's it's not so much about bad people versus good people that you can look at like the corporate mode of organization

53:44is almost a virus that's colonized a bunch of humanity and is is sucking people into working according to this mode and even if they're really good people and the individual task they're working on isn't bad in itself they're working within this this this mode that's leading their work to be used for ultimately a non-good end yeah that is a fascinating thing about corporations isn't it that the diffusion of responsibility and being a part of a gigantic group that you as an individual don't feel necessarily connected or responsible to them even the ceo isn't fully responsible like if the ceo does something that isn't in accordance with the high higher goals of the organization they're just replaced right so i mean i mean there there's no one person who's in charge it's really like it's it's like an ant column yeah it's like it's like its own organism yeah and i mean

54:37it's us who have let these organisms become parasites on humanity in this way in some ways the asian countries are a little more intelligent than western countries in the asian governments realize the power of corporations to mold society and there's a bit more feedback between the government and and and corporations which can be for better or for worse but in in america there's some ethos of like free markets and free enterprise which is really not taking into account the oligopolistic nature of of of modern markets but in asian countries isn't it that the government is actually suppressing information as well they're also suppressing google in south korea no i mean south korea if you look at one of the only ones well singapore i mean yeah really singapore is ruthless in their drug laws and some of their archaic well so is u.s they're far worse though singapore gives

55:42you the death penalty for marijuana they do yeah yeah yeah it's i mean south korea is an example which has roughly the same level of personal freedoms as the us more in some ways less than others massive electronic innovation and well interesting their thing there politically is i mean they were poorer than two-thirds of sub-saharan african nations in the late 60s and it is through the government intentionally stimulating corporate development toward manufacturing and electronics that that they grew up so that that that now i mean i'm not holding that up as a great paragon for the future or or or anything but it's it does show that there's there's many modes of organization of people and resources other than the ones that we take for granted in the us i don't think samsung and lg are the ideal for the future either though i mean i'm much more interested in you know

56:41you're interested in blockchain i'm interested in i'm interested in open source i'm interested in in blockchain i'm basically i'm interested in anything that's you know open and participatory open and participating disruptive right as well yeah because i think that's i think that is the way to be ongoingly dis disruptive and open source is a good example of that like when the open source movement started they weren't thinking about machine learning but you know the the fact that open source is out there and is then prevalent in the software world that pave the way for ai to now be centered on open source algorithms so right now even though big companies and governments dominate the scalable rollout of ai the invention of new ai algorithms is mostly done by people creating new code and putting it putting it on on github or git lab rather open source repository repositories open source is

57:37self-explanatory in its title pretty much people kind of understand what it is it means that various coders get to share in this this code and the source code and they they get to innovate and they they all get to participate and use each other's work right right um but blockchain is confusing for a lot of people yeah can you explain that sure i mean bl blockchain itself is is almost a misnomer so we're confused things are confusing at every level right so we can should start with the idea of a distributed ledger which is basically like a distributed excel spreadsheet or database it's just a store of information which is not stored just in one place but there's copies of it in a lot of different places every time my copy of it is updated everyone else's copy of it has has got to be updated and then then there's various bells and whistles like sharding where you know it can be broken

58:34in many pieces and each piece is stored many places or something so that's a distributed ledger and that's just distributed computing now what what makes it more interesting is when you layer decentralized control onto that so imagine you have this distributed excel spreadsheet or distributed database there's copies of it stored in a thousand places but to update it you need like 500 of those thousand people who own the copies to vote yeah let's do that update right so then then you have a distributed store of data and you have like a democratic voting mechanism to determine when all those copies can get can get updated together right so then then what you have is a data storage and update mechanism that's controlled in a democratic way by the group of participants rather than by any one central controller and that that can have all sorts of advantages i mean for

59:27one thing it means that you know there's no one controller who can go rogue and screw with all the data without telling anyone it also means there's no one who's some lunatic can go hold a gun to their head and shoot them for for what data updates were made because they you know it's controlled democratically by by everybody right it has all ramifications in terms of you know legal defensibility and i mean you could have some people in iran some in china some in the u.s and and updates to this whole distributed data store are made by democratic decision of all the participants then where cryptography comes in is when i vote i don't have to say yeah this is ben gertzel voting for this update to be accepted or not it's just id number one three five seven two six four and then encryption is used to make sure that you know it's it's the same guy voting every time that that that it

60:21claims to be without needing like your passport number or something right what's ironic about is it's probably one of the best ways ever conceived to actually vote in this country yeah sure it would be kind of ironic there's a lot of applications for it yeah the the the that's that's right so that there's so that i mean that's the core mechanism though where the blockchain comes from is like a data structure where to store the data in this distributed database it's stored in in a chain of blocks where each block contains data the thing is not every so-called blockchain system even uses a chain of blocks now like some use a a tree or a graph of blocks or something is it a bad term or is there any it's it's an alright term is it like ai like just one of those terms we're stuck with yeah yeah it's one it's one of those terms we're stuck with even though it's not quite technically

61:16not quite technically accurate and i mean anymore i mean because i don't know another buzzword for it right what it is is a it's a distributed ledger with encryption and decentralized control yeah and blockchain is the buzzword that's come about for that now what what got me interested in blockchain really is this decentralized control aspect so my my wife who i've been with for 10 years now she dug up recently something i'd forgotten which is a webpage i'd made in 1995 like a long time ago where i'd said hey i'm going to run for president on the decentralization platform right which i'd completely forgotten that that crazy idea i i was very young then i had no idea what an annoying job being president would be right but but that so that the idea of decentralized control seemed very important to me back then which is well before bitcoin was invented because i

62:11could see you know a global brain is evolving on the planet involving humans computers communication devices and we don't want this global brain to be controlled by by a small elite we want the global brain to be controlled in a decentralized way so so that that's really the the beauty of this uh blockchain infrastructure and what what got me interested in the practical technologies of blockchain was really when ethereum came out and you had the notion of a smart contract which was ethereum ethereum yeah so what is that well so the first blockchain technology was bitcoin right which is a well-known cryptocurrency now ethereum is another cryptocurrency which is the number two cryptocurrency right now that's how out of the loop i am did you know about it you did however ethereum came along with a really nice software framework so it's not just like a digital money like bitcoin is

63:12but ethereum has a programming language called solidity that came with it and this programming language lets you write what are called smart contracts and again that's sort of a misnomer because a smart contract doesn't have to be either smart or a contract right but but it was a cool name right right what does it mean then if it's really a smart contract contract it's like a programmable transaction okay so you can program a legal contract or you can program a financial transaction so a smart contract it's a it's a persistent piece of software that embodies like a secure encrypted transaction between between multiple parties so pretty much like anything on on the back end of a bank's website or a transaction between two companies online a purchasing relationship between you and their website online this could all be scripted in a smart contract in this secure way and then it would be

64:14automated in this simple and standard way so the vision that vitalik buterin who was the main creator behind ethereum had is to basically make the internet into a giant computing mechanism rather than mostly like an information storage and retrieval mechanism make the internet into a giant computer by making a really simple programming language for scripting transactions among different computers and different parties on the internet where you have encryption and you have democratic decision making and distributed storage of information like programmed into this this world computer right and that that was a really cool idea and the ethereum blockchain and solidity programming language made it really easy to do that so it made it really easy to program like distributed secure transaction and computing systems on the internet so i saw this i thought well like now we finally have

65:11the tool set that's needed to implement some how popular is this it's very popular yeah i mean i mean basically almost every ico that was done in the last couple years was done on the ethereum blockchain what's an ico initial coin offering oh okay so for bitcoins for not i'm sorry cryptocurrency cryptocurrencies yeah use this technology yeah yes offerings right so what happened in the last couple years is a bunch of people realized you could use this ethereum programming framework to create a new cryptocurrency right like a new artificial money and then you could try to get people to use your new artificial money for certain types of how many artificial coins thousands thousands maybe more yeah yeah and but i mean how much popular is bitcoin right or the bitcoin is bitcoin is by far the most popular the most ethereum is number two and there's a bunch of others i mean what

66:11comparison like how much bigger is bitcoin than ethereum i don't know five factories factor of three to five so yeah well maybe just a factor of two now it's actually last year ethereum almost took over bitcoin when bitcoin started crashing yeah yeah now ethereum is back down it might be half or a third does that worry you the the fluctuating value of these things well to my to my mind creating artificial monies is one tiny bit of the potential of what you could do with the whole blockchain tool set it it happened to become popular initially right because it's where the money is right i mean it is it is it is money and that's interesting to people but on on the other hand what it's really about is making a world computer it's about scripting with a simple programming language all sorts of transactions between people companies whatever all sorts of exchanges of of information so i mean

67:17it's about decentralized voting mechanisms it's about ais being able to send data and processing for each other and and pay each other for their transactions so i mean there's it's about automating supply chains and and shipping and e-commerce so that there's an in in in essence you know just like computers and the internet started with a certain small set of applications and then pervaded almost everything right yeah it's the same way with blockchain technology like it started with digital money but the core technology is is going to pervade almost everything because there's almost no domain of human pursuit that couldn't use like security through cryptography some sort of you know participatory decision making and then distributed storage of information right so and these things are also valuable for ai which is how i got into it in the first place i mean

68:15if you're making a very very powerful ai that is going to you know gradually through the practical value it delivers you will grow up to be more and more and more intelligent i mean this ai should be able to engage a large party of people and ai's in participatory decision-making they i should be able to store information you know in a widely distributed way and and the ai certainly should be able to use you know security and encryption to validate who are the parties involved in its operation and i mean these are the key things behind behind blockchain technology so i mean the fact the fact that blockchain began with artificial currencies to me is a detail of history just like the fact the fact that the internet began as like a nuclear early warning system right i mean it did it's good for that but it's as it happens it's also even better for a lot of other things so yeah

69:08the the solution for the financial situation that we find ourselves in it's one of the more interesting things about cryptocurrencies that someone said okay look obviously we all kind of agree that our financial institutions are very flawed the system that we operate under is it's very up so how do we fix that well send in the super nerds and so they figure out a new and we gotta send into super ai super ai super nerds and then the super i mean obviously who who's the guy that they think the the this uh fake person that's maybe not real that came up with bitcoin oh satoshi nakamoto do you have any uh suspicions as to who this is uh i can neither confirm nor deny that no okay okay yeah you wouldn't be on the inside we'll talk later um but that this is it's very uh it's very interesting but it's also very promising i i've like high optimism for cryptocurrencies because i think that

70:08kids today uh are looking at it with much more open eyes than uh you know grandfathers well grandfathers are looking at bitcoin they're going to have mcgregor i'm a grandfather i'm sure you are but you're an exceptional one but there's a lot of people that are older that just they're not open to accepting these ideas but i think kids today in particular the ones that have grown up with the internet as a constant force in their life they're i think they're more likely to embrace something along those lines well yeah so there's no doubt that you know cryptographic formulations of money are going to become the standard the question do you think that's going to be the standard that will happen yeah however it could happen potentially in a very uninteresting way you could just have the e-dollar i mean the i mean a government could just say we will create this cryptographic token

71:05which counts as a dollar i mean most dollars are just electronic anyway all right right so so what what what habitually happens is technologies that are invented to subvert the establishment are converted to a form where they help bolster the establishment instead i mean and in financial services this happens very rapidly like paypal peter thiel and those guys started paypal thinking they were going to obsolete fiat currency and make an alternative to the currencies run by by nation states instead they were driven to make it a credit card uh processing front end right so so that's one thing that could happen with cryptocurrency is it just becomes a mechanism for you know governments and big companies and banks to do their things more efficiently so what what's interesting isn't so much the digital money aspect although it is in some ways a great way to do digital money what

72:04what's interesting is with all the flexibility it gives you to script you know complex computing networks in there is the possibility to script new forms of you know participatory democratic self-organizing networks so blockchain like the internet or computing is a very flexible medium you could use it to make tools of oppression or you could use it to make tools of amazing growth growth and liberation and obviously we know which one i'm more interested in yeah no what what is blockchain what is blockchain being currently used for like what what different applications because it's not just cryptocurrency they're using a bunch of different things now right they are i would say it's very early stage so probably the how early well the heaviest uses of blockchain now are probably inside large financial services companies actually so if you look at ethereum the project i mentioned so

73:10ethereum is run by an open source an open foundation the ethereum foundation then there's a consulting company called consensus which is a totally separate organization that was founded by joe lubin who was one of the founders of ethereum in the early days and consensus has you know it's funded a bunch of the work within the ethereum foundation and community but consensus has done a lot of contracts just working with governments and big companies to customize code based on ethereum to help with their internal operations so actually a lot of the practical value has been with stuff that isn't in the public eye that much but it's like back end in in inside of companies and in terms of practical customer facing uses of of cryptocurrency i mean the tron blockchain which is different than ethereum that has a bunch of games on it for example and some online gambling for for that matter so that

74:11that's uh that's gotten a lot of users but they're online games like how how do they use that well it's a payment mechanism oh i say but that they're this is one of the things there's a lot of handwringing about in the cryptocurrency world now is gambling no just the fact that there aren't that many big consumer-facing uses of of of of cryptocurrency i mean i mean everyone would everyone would like there to be that was the idea and this is one of the things we're aiming at with our singularity net project is to you know we by putting ai on the blockchain in a highly effective way and then we're also we have these two tiers so we have the singularity net foundation which is is creating this open source decentralized platform in which ais can talk to other ais and you know like ants and economy group together to form smarter and smarter ai then we're spinning off

75:10a company called the singularity studio which will use this decentralized platform to help big companies integrate ai into their operations so with the singularity studio company we want to get all these big companies using the ai tools in the singularity net platform and then we want to drive you know massive usage of blockchain in the singularity net that that way so that's if we're successful with what we're doing this will be you know within a year from now or something by far the biggest usage of blockchain outside of financial exchange is our use of blockchain within singularitynet for ai basically for customers to get the ai services that they need for their businesses and then for ais to transact with other ais paying other ais for doing services for them because this this this i think is is a path forward it's like a society and economy of mind it's not like one

76:11monolithic ai right it's a whole bunch of ais carried by different people all over the world with not only are in the marketplace providing services to customers but each ai is asking questions of each other and then rating each other of how good they are sending data to each other and paying each other for their services so this this like network of ais can emerge in intelligence on the whole network level as well as there being intelligence in each each component and is it also fascinating to you that this is not dependent upon nations this is a world well yeah that i think i think that's going to be important once once it starts to get a very high level of intelligence in the early stages okay what would it hurt like if if i had you know my own database a central record of everything like i'm an honest person i'm not going to rip anyone off but once we start to make a transition

77:07toward artificial general intelligence in this global decentralized network which has component ais from every country on the planet like at that point once it's clear you're getting toward agi a lot of people want to step in and control this thing you know by law by military might by any means necessary by that point the fact that you have this open decentralized network under underpinning everything like this gives an amazing resilience to what you're doing like who can shut down linux who can shut down bitcoin nobody can right yeah you you want ai you want ai to be like that you want to be a global you know upsurge of of creativity and and mutual benefit from people all over the planet which no powerful party can can shut down even if they're afraid that it threatens their hegemony it's very interesting because in a lot of ways that's a it's a very elegant

78:00solution to what's an obvious problem yeah yeah just as the internet is an elegant solution to what's in hindsight an obvious problem right it's a distribution of information yeah yeah yeah to communicate yeah this but this is uh extra special to me because it if i was a person running a country i would be terrified of this i'd be like well this is what's gonna that depends which country if you're a person running the us or china you you would have a different relationship than if you're a person like i know the prime minister of ethiopia abi ahmed who's a has a degree in software engineering and wow he he loves this but of course ethiopia isn't in any direction any other countries right and they're not in any danger of of individually like taking global ai hegemony right so for the majority of countries in the world they like this for the same reason they like

78:54linux right i'm i mean i mean this this is something in which they have an equal role to anybody else right the the super powers and you see this among among companies also though so a lot of big companies that we're talking to they like the idea of this decentralized ai fabric because i mean if you're not amazon google microsoft tencent facebook so on if you're another large corporation you don't necessarily want all your ai and all your data to be going into one of this handful of large ai companies you would rather have it be in a secure descent decentralized platform and i mean this is the same reason that you know cisco and ibm they run on linux they don't run on microsoft right so if if you're not one of the handful of large governments or large corporations that happen to be in a leading role in the ai ecosystem then you would rather have this this

79:52equalizing and decentralized theme because everyone gets to play yeah what would be the benefit of running it on linux versus microsoft well you're not at the behest of some other big company i mean imagine if im imagine if if you were cisco or gm or something and all of your internal machines are all your servers are running on microsoft what if microsoft increases their price or or removes some feature then right you're totally at at their behest right and with ai the same thing is true i mean if if you put all your data in some big companies server farm and you're analyzing all your data on their algorithms and that's critical to your business model what if they change their ai algorithm in some way then i mean then your business is is basically controlled by this other company so i mean having a decentralized platform in which you're you know an equal participant along with

80:55everybody else is is actually a much better position to be in and i think this this i think is why we can succeed with this plan of having this you know decentralized singularity net platform than this singularity studio enterprise software company which mediates between the decentralized platform and big companies i mean it's because most companies and governments in the world you know they don't want hegemony of a few large governments and corporations either and you can see this in in a lot of ways you can see this in embrace of of linux and and ethereum by many large corporations you can also see like in a different way you know the in the indian government you know they rejected an offer by facebook to give free internet to all indians because facebook wanted to give like mobile phones it would give free internet but only to access facebook right

81:54india is like well no no thanks right and india is now giving they're now creating laws that any internet company that collects data about indian people has to store that data in india which is so the indian government can subpoena that data when they want to right so so you're already seeing a bunch of resistance against hegemony by a few large governments or large large corporations by other companies and other governments and i think this this is is very positive and is one of the factors that that can foster the foster the the growth of a decentralized ai ecosystem is it fair to say that the future of ai is severely dependent upon who launches it first like whoever if whether it's singularity or not the bottom line is artificial gender intelligence the bottom line is as a scientist i have to say we don't know right it could be there's an end state that agi will just

82:57self-organize into almost independent of the initial condition but we don't know and given that we don't know i'm operating under the you know the heuristic assumption that if the first ai is beneficially oriented if it's controlled in a participatory democratic way and if it's oriented at least substantially toward like doing good things for humans i'm operating under the heuristic assumption that this is going to bias things in a positive positive direction right i mean of course in the absence of knowledge to the contrary but if the chinese government launches one that they're controlling yeah we don't know how to pop it off first i mean i like the idea that you're saying though that it might organize itself i mean i understand the chinese government also they want they want the best for the chinese people they don't they don't want to make the terminator either right so i mean i

84:01i i i think even even donald trump who's not my favorite person doesn't actually want to kill off everyone on the planet right so he might if they talk about him yeah yeah yeah you you know you know you never know it was just him yeah yeah i told you all yeah so i mean i i i think you know i wouldn't say we're necessarily doomed if big governments and big companies are the ones that that develop ai or agi big government big companies essentially developed the internet right and it got away from them that's right that's right so there's a lot of uncertainty all around but i think you know it behooves us to do what we can to bias the odds in our favor based on our current understanding and i mean toward that end we're developing you know open source decentralized ai in in singularity in that process so if you would explain some singularity net and what what you

84:57guys are actually involved in sure sure so singularitynet in itself is a platform that allows many different ais to operate on it and these ais can offer services to anyone who requests services of the network and they can also request and offer services among each other so it's it's both just an online marketplace for ais much like you know the apple app store or google play store but for ais rather than phone apps but the difference is the different ais in here can outsource work to each other and talk to each other and that gives a new dimension to it right where you can have we think of as a society or economy of minds and it gives the possibility that this whole society of interacting ais which are then they're paying each other for transactions with our digital money or our cryptographic token which is called the agi token so these ais which are paying each other

86:04and rating each other of how good they are sending data and questions and answers to each other can self-organize into some overall ai mind now we're building this platform and then we're plugging into it to cede it a bunch of ai's of our own creation so i've been working for 10 years on this open source ai project called opencog which is oriented toward building general intelligence and we're putting a bunch of ai agents based on the opencog platform into this singularity net network and you know if we're successful in a couple years the ai's that we put on there will be a tiny minority of what's in there just like the apps made by google or a small minority of the apps in in the in the google play store right but my hope is that these open cog ai agents within the larger pool of ais on the singularity net can sort of serve as the the general intelligence core because

87:03the opencog ai agents are really good at abstraction and generalization and creativity we can put another a bunch of other ais in there that are good at highly specific forms of learning like predicting financial time series curing diseases answering people's questions organizing your inbox so you can have the interaction of these specialized ais and then more general purpose you know abstraction and creativity based ai's like open cog agents all interacting together in this decentralized platform and then you know the beauty of it is like some some 15 year old genius in azerbaijan or the congo can put some brilliant ai into this network if it's really smart it will get rated highly by the other ais for for for its work helping them do their thing then it can get replicated over and over again across many servers suddenly a this 16 year old kid from

87:59azerbaijan under the congo could become wealthy from from their copies of their ai providing services to other people's ais and b you know the creativity in their mind is out there and is infusing this global ai network with some some new intellectual dna that you know never would have been found by a 10 cent or a google because they're not going to hire some congolese teenager who may have a brilliant ai idea that's amazing that's amazing so this is all ongoing right now and the term singularity that you guys are using the the way i've understood that term correctly if i'm wrong is that it's going to be the one innovation or one invention that essentially changes everything forever the singularity isn't necessarily one invention the singularity which is coined uh by kurzweil it's coined by my friend vernon vindy who's another guy you should interview he's in san diego too a

88:59lot of guys cool a lot of brilliant guys down there but verner vinci is a secretary down there yeah verner vinja he was a math professor at uh san diego university actually but well-known science fiction writer his book uh fire upon the deep one of the great science fiction books do you spell his name please v-i-n-g-e verner vinji g-e yeah bro brilliant guy fire upon the d-e-r-n-e-r yeah he's brilliant he coined the term technological singularity back in the 1980s really but he he opted not to become a pundit about it because he'd rather write more science fiction that's interesting than a science fiction author ray kurzweil who's also a good friend of mine i mean ray took that term and fleshed it out and did a bunch of data analytics trying to pinpoint like when it's gonna happen when it would happen but the basic concept of the technological singularity is a point in time when

90:00technological advance occurs so rapidly that to the human mind it appears almost instantaneous like like imagine ten new nobel prize winning discoveries every second or something right so this is similar to the concept of the intelligence explosion that was posited by the mathematician ij good in 1965 what i j good said then the year before i was born was the first truly intelligent machine will be the last invention that humanity needs to make right right so this is an intelligence explosion is another term for basically the same thing as a technological singularity but it's not just about ai ai is just probably the most powerful technology driving it i mean there's ai there's nanotechnology there's femto technology which will be building things from elementary particles i mean there's life extension genetic engineering mind uploading which is like reading the

90:57the mind of your brain and putting putting it into a machine you know there's advanced energy technologies so that all these different things are expected to advance at around the same time and they have many ways to boost each other right because the you know the better ai you have your ai can then invent new ways of doing nanotech and biology but if you invent amazing new nanotech and quantum computing that could make your ai smarter on the other hand if you if you could crack how the human brain works and genetic engineering to upgrade human intelligence those smarter humans can then make better ais and nanotechnology right so there's so many virtuous cycles among these different technologies the more you advance in any of them the more you're going to advance in in all of them and it's the coming together of all of these that's going to create you know radical abundance and and the

91:48technological singularity so that that term which verna vinji introduced ray kurzweil borrowed for his books and for the the singular the university educational program and then we borrowed that for our singularity net like decentralized blockchain based ai platform and our singularity studio enterprise software company now i want to talk to you about two parts of what you just said one being the possibility that one day we can upload our mind or make copies of our mind you up for it you want to upload into here yeah i could use a little joe rogan on my phone you could just call me dude i'll give you the organic version but the do you think that that's a real possibility inside of our lifetime that we can map out the human mind to the point where we could essentially recreate it but if you do recreate it without all the biological herbs and the human reward systems that are built in what

92:48the are we i mean well that's a different question right i mean i i think what is your mind well i i think that there's two things that are needed for let's say let's say human body uploading to simplify things body uploading there are two things that are needed one thing is a better computing infrastructure than we have now okay to host the uploaded body and and the other thing is a better scanning technology because right now we don't have a way to scan the molecular structure of your body without like freezing you slicing you and scanning you which you probably don't want down at this point in time right yeah so assuming both those are solved i mean you could then recreate in some computer simulation you know an accurate simulacrum of of of of what you are right but that's where i'm getting this where i'm getting at the an accurate simulacrum is get that's

93:46getting weird because the biological variability of human beings we vary day to day we're very dependent upon it and your simulation would also vary day to day so program it in to have flaws because we vary depending upon how much sleep we get whether or not we're feeling sick whether we're lonely so it's all these if your upload were an accurate copy of you then the simulation hosting your upload would need to have an accurate simulation of the laws of biophysics and chemistry that allow your body to you know evolve from one second to the next my concern is your upload would change second by second just like just like you do and it would diverge from you right so i mean after an hour it will be a little different after a year it might have gone in in a quite different direction for you but probably a monk some super god monk living on the top of a mountain somewhere in a year if

94:39he keeps giving the problem the point depends on what virtual world it's living in true i mean if it's living in the virtual virtual world will be a virtual world if you're not talking about the potential of downloading this again in sort of a into a biological there's a lot of possibilities right yeah i mean you you could you could upload into a joe rogan living in a virtual world and then just create your own fantasy universe or you or you could 3d print an alternate synthetic body right i mean once once you have the ability to manipulate molecules at will this the scope of possibilities becomes much greater than we're used to thinking right like my question is do do we replicate flaws do we replicate depression of course but why don't we do that when we want to cure depression so if we do cure depression here's the interesting thing okay once once we have you in a digital form right

95:35then it's very programmable so then right then we use up the dopamine the serotonin then you can change what you want and then you have a whole different set of issues right yeah because once you've changed i mean suppose you make a fork of yourself and then you manipulate in a certain way and you're then after a few hours you're like well i don't i don't much like this uh new joe here maybe we should roll back that change but the new joe was like well i like myself very well thank you right so then yeah there's a lot of issues that that will come up once we can write modify and then reprogram ourselves but isn't the point that the ramifications of these decisions are almost insurmountable like once once the ball gets rolling well the ramifications of the the ramifications of these decisions are going to be very interesting to explore yes you're super positive ben

96:32super positive of your optimism many bad things will happen many good things will happen that's a very that's a very easy prediction to me okay i see what you're saying yeah i'm just a wonderful i mean think about like world travel right like like hundreds of years ago most people didn't travel more than a very short distance from their home and you could say well okay what if what if people could travel all over the world right like what horrible things could happen they would lose their culture like they might go marry someone from a random tribe you could get killed in in the arctic region or something a lot of bad things can happen when you travel far from your home a lot of good things can happen and the ultimately the ramifications were not foreseen by people 500 years ago yeah i mean we're going into a lot of new domains we can't see the details of the pluses

97:22and minuses that that are going to unfold uh it would behoove us to simply become comfortable with radical uncertainty because otherwise we're going to confront it anyway and we're just going to be nervous so it's just inevitable this is this uh it's almost inevitable i mean of course barring any natural disaster yeah yeah i mean of course trump could start a nuclear war and then we're resetting to ground zero just as likely to get hit by an asteroid right yeah i mean so barring a catastrophic outcome i believe a technological singularity is essentially inevitable there's a radical uncertainty attached to this on the other hand you know inasmuch as we humans can know anything it would seem commonsensically there's the ability to bias this in a positive rather than the negative direction yeah we should be spending more of our attention on doing that rather than for instance

98:22advertising spying and making chocolatier chocolates and all the other things but how many people are doing that i mean it's prevalent it's everywhere but i mean how many people are actually at the helm of that as opposed to how many people are working on various aspects of technology all across the planet it's a small group in comparison working on explicitly bringing about the singularity is a small group yeah on the other hand supporting technologies is a very large group so think about like gpus where did they come from accelerating gaming right lo and behold they're amazingly useful for training neural net models which is one among many important types of ai right so a large amount of the planet's resources are now getting spent on technologies that are indirectly supporting these singularitarian technologies so as another example like microarrayers that let you measure the

99:16expression level of genes how how much each gene is doing in your body at each point in time these were originally developed you know as an outgrowth of printing technology then instead of sporting ink alphametrics figured out you could squirt dna right so i mean the amount of technology specifically oriented toward the singularity doesn't have to be large because the overall you know spectrum of supporting technologies can be subverted in that direction do you do you have any concerns at all about a virtual world i mean we may be in one right now man how do you know yeah that's true yeah but it's fine my problem is i want to find that programmer and get them to make more attractive people you know well isn't that i i would say that that's part of the reason why attractive people are so interested that they're unique and rare yeah oh it's one of the problems with calling everything

100:09beautiful yeah you know everything we're saying everything is generous beautiful i was like wow you just have you have to get realistic if i get in the right frame of mind i can find anything beautiful well you can find it unique and interesting no i can find anything beautiful okay i guess i guess but in terms of like yeah i guess it's subjective right really it is we're talking about beauty right yeah now but existential angst just on the the when people sit and think about the pointlessness of our own existence like we are these finite beings that are clinging to a balls that spins a thousand miles an hour hurling through infinity what's the point like there's a lot of that that goes around already if we create an artificial environment that we can literally somehow another download a version of us and it exists in this blockchain created or or powered weird simulation world

101:11what would be i mean what would be the point what i really believe which is a bit personal and maybe different than many of my colleagues i mean what i really believe is that these advancing technologies are going to lead us to unlock many different states of consciousness and experience than then most people are are are currently aware of i mean you you say we're we're just insignificant species on a you know a speck of rock hurtling in the other side i wouldn't say we're insignificant i don't know i would say there's people that have existential angst because they wonder about what the purpose is i don't fall into that category i tend to feel like we understand almost nothing about who and and what we are and our knowledge about the universe is far smaller extremely miniscule i mean if anything i look at things for more of a buddhist or phenomenological way like

102:16there's sense perceptions and then out of those sense perceptions models arise and accumulate including a model of the self and the model of the body and the model of the physical world out there and by the time you get to planets and stars and blockchains you're building like hypothetical models on top of hypothetical models and then you know we're we're by building intelligent machines and mind uploading machines and virtual realities we're going to radically transform you know our whole state of consciousness our understanding of what mind and matter are our experience of our own selves or even whether a self exists and i think ultimately the state of consciousness of a human being like a hundred years from now after a technological singularity is gonna bear very little resemblance to the states of consciousness we have now we're just gonna we're gonna see a much

103:22wider universe than any of us now imagine imagine to exist now this is my own personal view of things you don't have to agree with that to think the technological singularity will be valuable but that is how i look at i know like ray kurzweil and i agree there's going to be a technological singularity within decades at most and ray and i agree that you know if we bias technology development appropriately we can very likely you know guide this to be a world of abundance and and benefit for humans as well as ais but ray is a bit more of a down-to-earth empiricist than than i am like he thinks we understand more about the universe right now than than i do so i mean there's a wide spectrum of views that are rational and sensible to have but my own view is we understand really really little of what we are and what what this world is and this is part of my own personal quest

104:30for wanting to upgrade my brain and wanting to create artificial intelligences is like i've always been driven above all else but i want to understand everything i can about the world so i mean i've studied every kind of science and engineering and social science and read every kind of literature but in the end the scope of human understanding is clearly very small although at least we're smart enough to understand how little we understand which i think my dog doesn't understand how little he understands right yeah so and even like my 10 month old son he understands how little he understands which is interesting right because he's uh because he's because he's also a human right so i i think i mean everything we think and believe now is gonna seem absolutely absurd to us after there's a singularity we're just going to look back and laugh in the warm-hearted way at all

105:21the incredibly silly things we were thinking and doing back when we were trapped in our in our you know our primitive biological brains and bodies that's stunning that that in your opinion or your assessment is somewhere less than 100 years away from now yeah that's requires exponential thinking right because if you that's hard to wrap your head around right i don't know it's it's immediate it's immediate for me to wrap my head around but for a lot of people that you explain it to i'm sure that that's a little bit of a roadblock no it is it is it took me some time to get my parents to wrap their head around it because they didn't they're not they're not technologists but i mean i i find if you get people to pay attention and sort of lead them through all the supporting evidence most people can comprehend these ideas reasonably well you go back to computers from 1960 it's

106:13just hard to grow it's hard to grab people's attention and yeah mobile phones have made a big difference like i spent a lot of time in africa in addis ababa in ethiopia where we have a large ai development office and you know the fact that mobile phones and then smartphones have rolled out so quickly even in rural africa and have had such a transformative impact i mean this is a metaphor that lets people understand the speed with what's exponential change can happen when you talk about yourself and you talk about consciousness and how you interface with the world how how do you see this i mean when you say that we might be living in a simulation do you actually entertain that oh yeah you do i mean i think the word simulation is probably wrong but yet the idea of an empirical you know materialist physical world is almost certainly wrong also so i mean so well again if you go back to a

107:13phenomenal view i mean you could look at the mind as primary and you know your mind is building the world as a model as a simple explanation of it of its perceptions on the other hand then what is the mind the self is also a model that get that gets built out of out of its perceptions but then if i accept that your mind has some fundamental existence also based on the sort of iu feeling that you're like a mind there our minds are working together to build each other and and and to build this world and there there's a there's there's a whole different way of of thinking about reality in terms of first and second person experience rather than these empiricist views like this is a computer simulation or something right but you still agree that this is a physical reality that we exist in or do not what does that word mean that's a weird word right it is

108:12what is it your interpretation physical reality if you look in in modern physics even quantum mechanics there's something called the relational interpretation of quantum mechanics which says that there's no sense in thinking about an observed entity you should only think about an observed comma observer pair like there's no sense to think about some thing except from the perspective of of some observer so that's that's even true within our best current theory of modern physics as as induced from empirical empirical observations but in a pragmatic sense you know if you take a plane and fly to china you actually land in china i guess yeah you'd guess don't you live there i live in hong kong yeah yeah well close to china i mean i i i i have an unusual state of consciousness that's what i'm trying to get at well if you think about it like how do you know that

109:12you're not a brain floating in a vet somewhere which is being fed illusions by a certain evil scientist and two seconds from now he's gonna pull this simulated world disappears then you realize you're just a brain in a vatican you you don't know that you're right but based on your own personal experiences of falling in love with a woman and moving to another these may all be put into my brain by the evil scientists how do we know but they're they're very consistent are they not the the possibly illusory and implanted memories are very consistent yeah i guess i guess my own state of mind is i'm always sort of acutely aware that this simulation might all disappear at at any at any one moment i i'm sorry you're acutely aware of this consciously on an everyday basis yeah pretty much really yeah really why is that that doesn't seem to make sense i mean it's it's pretty

110:07it's pretty rock solid it's here every day i mean so so your possibly implanted memories lead you to believe yes my possibly implanted memories lead to believe that this life is incredibly consistent yeah yeah this is this is incredibly consistent this is hume's problem of of induction right from philosophy class and and it's not and it's not solved i'm with you in a conceptual sense i i get it i just feel this philosophy but you you embody it right this is something you carry with you all the time yeah on the other hand i mean i'm still carrying out many actions with long-term planning in mind like i've been i've been working on designing ai for 30 years you might be designing it inside of simulation i might be and i'm working on building the same ai system you know since we started opencog in 2008 but that's using code from 2001 that i was building with my

111:09colleagues even even earlier so i mean i think long-term planning is very natural to me but but nevertheless i don't i don't want to make any assumptions about about what sort of what sort of simulation or reality that that that we're living in yeah and i think everyone's going to hit a lot of surprises a similar singularity you know we we may find out that this hat is a messenger from after the singularity so it traveled back through time to implant into my brain the idea of how to create ai and thus let's bring it into existence well who it oh that was mckenna that had this idea that something in the yeah ideas to this attraction terence mckenna yeah he had the same idea like some posts post singularity intelligence which actually was living outside of time somehow yeah he's reaching back and putting into his brain the idea of how to bring about the singularity well not

112:08just that but novelty itself was being drawn into this yeah there was a time wave zero that was going to reach the apex in 2012 that didn't work no he died before that so he i didn't get a chance to hear what his what his uh idea was yeah you know i had some funny interactions with some mckenna fanatic 2012 arts this was about 2007 or so this guy came to washington where i was living then and he brought my friend hugo de garis another crazy ai researcher with him and he's like the singularity is going to happen in 2012 because terence mckenna said so and we need to be sure it's it's a good singularity so you can't move to china then it will be a bad singularity so we have so we have to get the us government to give billions of dollars to your research to guarantee that the singularity in 2012 is a good singularity right so he he led us around to meet with these generals

113:10and and various high hoo-has in in dc to get them to fund hugo de garas's and my ai research to guarantee i wouldn't move to china and hugo wouldn't move to china so the u.s would create a positive singularity no the effort failed hugo hugo moved to china then i moved there some years after so then this this 2012 i he went back to his apartment he made a a mix of percent vodka fifty percent robitussin pm he like drank it down he's like all right i'm gonna have my own personal singularity right here and i haven't talked to that guy since 2012 either to see what he thinks about about the singularity not happening then but i mean terence mckenna had a lot of interesting ideas but i felt you know he he mixed up this the symbolic with the empirical more than than i would i would prefer to do right i mean right i mean it's it's very interesting to look at these

114:14abstract symbols and and cosmic insights but then you have to sort of put your scientific mindset on and say well what's a metaphor and what's what's like an actual empirical scientific truth within the within the scientific domain and that he's a little bit half-baked right i mean the whole idea was based on the ching he had uh had he was a mushroom you know you know he brought his ayahuasca it was an ayahuasca was it that led him to the the iching i don't believe it was maybe i mean it was psilocybin it might have been okay yeah i mean i know you know his brother dennis yes i know him very well yeah yeah so they yeah your brother thinks that the time wave zero was a little bit nonsense yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah but he was silly he read their their book with true hallucinations right yeah i read that yeah very very very very interesting stuff and there's a mixture of deep

115:10insight there yeah with a bunch of interesting metaphorical things well that's the isn't that the problem when you get involved in psychedelic drugs it's hard to differentiate like what makes sense what's what's this unbelievably powerful insight and what is just some crazy idea you can learn to make that differentiation you think so yes yeah but but uh yeah i'm in granted terence mckenna probably took more psychedelic drugs than i would generally recommend well it's also he was speaking all the time and uh there's just something that i can attest to from podcasting all the time sometimes you're just talking you don't know what the you're saying you know and you become a prisoner to your words in a lot of ways you you get locked up in this idea of expressing this thought that may or may not be viable i'm not sure that he was after empirical truth in the same sense that

116:07say ray kurzweil is like when when rey is saying we're going to get human level ai in 2029 and then you know massively superhuman ai in a singularity in 2045 i mean ray ray is very literal like he's plotting charts right i mean terence terence was thinking on an impressionistic and and symbolic level right so is a it was a bit different so you have to take that in a poetic sense rather than in a literal sense and yeah i think it's very interesting to go back and forth between the you know the symbolic and poetic domain and the either concrete science and engineering domain right but it's also valuable to be able to draw that draw that distinction right because yeah you can draw a lot of insight from the kind of thinking terence mckenna was was doing and certainly if you explore psychedelics you can gain a lot of insights into how the mind and universe work but then when when you put

117:12on your science and engineering mindset you want to be rigorous about which insights do you take and which ones do you do you throw out and ultimately you want you want to proceed on the basis of what works and what doesn't right and i mean dennis was pretty strong on that yes terence was a bit less in that empirical direction well dennis is actually a career scientist yeah yeah um how how many people involved in artificial intelligence are also educated in the the ways of psychedelics yeah that's all you have to say is that yeah unfortunately the illegal nature of these things it's a little hard to pin down i would say before the recent generation of people going into ai because it was a way to make money the ai field was incredibly full of really really interesting people and you know deep thinkers about about the mind and in the last few years of course

118:12ai has replaced like business school as what your grandma wants you to do to have a good career so i mean you're getting you're getting a lot of people into ai just because it's financially wrong yeah it's it's cool it's functionally viable it's popular because i can you know in our generation ai was not ai was not what your grandma wanted you to do so as to be able to buy a nice house and support a family right so you got into it because you really were curious about how the mind works and of course many people played with psychedelics because it also they were curious about you know what it was teaching them about about how how their mind works yeah i had a nice long conversation with ray kurzweil and uh we talked for about an hour and a half and it was for this uh sci-fi show that i was doing at the time and uh some of his ideas uh he has this uh this is this is number that they have

119:10that people throw about it's like 20 42 right isn't that is that still 2045 is it 45 no no you're being the optimist no you're combining that with douglas hofstadter's 42 which is the answer to the universe no the 242 thing was the new york conference that would take place in 2000 that was 2045 was it i was at that conference okay that was organized by demetrius oh you're right another friend of mine from russia i'm off by three years it's 2045. so but that was that was that was ray's prognostication why why that year um he did some curve situations yeah i mean he he looks at moore's law he looks at the the advance and the accuracy of brain scanning look at the advance of computer memory the miniaturization of various devices and like plotting a whole bunch of these curves that was the best guess that you came up with i mean of course there's some confidence interval around that what do

120:03you see as potential monkey wrenches that could be thrown into all this innovation like where where the pitfalls well i mean the pitfall is always the one that you that you don't see right so i mean of course it's possible there's some science or engineering obstacle that that we're not for seeing right now i mean it's also possible that all major nations are overtaken by like uh religious fanatics or something which which slows down development somewhat a few thousand years i think it would just be by a few decades actually but yeah i mean in terms of scientific pitfalls i mean one possibility which i don't think is likely one pos but it's possible one possibility is human-like intelligence requires advanced quantum computers like it can't be done on the standard classical digital computer right do you think that's the case no but on the other hand because there's no evidence that human

121:05cognition relies on quantum effects in the human brain like based on everything we know about neuroscience now it seems not to be the case like there's no evidence it's the case but it's possible it's the case because we don't understand everything about how the brain works the thing is even if that's true like there's loads of amazing research going on in quantum computing right and so we're going to have you know you'll probably have a qpu quantum processing unit in in in your phone in like 10 to 20 years or something right so i mean so that would that might throw off the 2045 date but in a historical sense it doesn't change the picture like i've got a bunch of research saying on my hard drive on how we improve open cogs ai using quantum computers once we have better quantum computers right so there's there could be other things like that which are

121:57technical roblox that we're not seeing now but i really doubt those are going to delay things by more than like a decade or two or something on the other hand things could also go faster than than than ray's prediction which is which is what i'm pushing towards so what are you pushing towards what do you think i would like to get a human level general intelligence in five to seven years from now wow i don't think that's by any means impossible because i think our open cog design is adequate to do it but i mean it takes a lot of people working coherently for a while to build something something big like will this be encased in a physical form like a robot it'll be in the compute cloud i mean it can use many robots as as user interfaces but the same ai could control many different robots actually and many other sensors and systems besides robots i mean i

122:50think the human-like form factor like we have with sophia and our other hanson robots the human-like form factor is really valuable as a tool for allowing the cloud-based ai mind to you know engage with humans and to learn human cultures and values because i mean getting back to what we were discussing at the beginning of this chat you know the best way to get human values and culture into the ai is for humans and ais to enter into many shared like social emotional embodied situations together so having a human-like embodiment for the ai is important for that like hey i can look you in the eye you can share your facial expressions it can bond with you it can see the way you react when you see like a sick person by the side of the road or something right and and you know can see you ask the ai to get give the homeless person the twenty dollars or something i mean the ai

123:44understands what money is and understands what that action means so i mean interacting with an ai in human-like form is going to be valuable as a learning mechanism for the ai and as a learning mechanism for people to get more comfortable with with ai's but i mean ultimately one advantage of being you know a digital mind is you don't have to be wedded to any particular embodiment the ai can go between many different bodies and it can transfer knowledge between the many different bodies that it's occupied well that's the real concern that the the people that are that have this dystopian view of artificial intelligence have is that a.i may already exist and it's just sitting there waiting to americans watch too many bad movies i mean in asia in asia everyone thinks ai will be our friend and will love us and help us yeah yeah very very very much that's what you're pumping out there no

124:37that's their philosophy is different i guess i mean you look in japanese anime i mean there's been ais and robots for a long time they're they're usually people's friends there's no dystopian aesthetic and it's the same in china and korea the general guess there is that ais and robots will be people's friends and will will help people and somehow the general guess in america is this going to be some big nasty robo soldier marching down the street well we have guys like elon musk who we rely upon who's smarter than us and he's terrified of it sam harris is terrified of it yeah very smart people that just think it could really be a huge disaster for the human race it's not just bad movies because no it's a cultural thing because the oriental culture is sort of social good oriented most orientals think a lot in terms of what's good for the family or the society

125:38as opposed to themselves personally and so they just make the default assumption that ais are going to be the same way worse americans are more like me me me oriented and i say that as an american as well and but that's right and then they sort of assume that ai's are going to be that that's the same way possible it's like a it's like a raw sock right whatever is in your mind you impose on this ai when we don't actually know what it's going to become right but there it is there are potential negative aspects of course to artificial intelligence deciding that we're illogical and unnecessary well we are illogical and unnecessary yes but that doesn't mean that ai should be badly disposed toward us i mean yeah did you see ex machina i did do you like it sure it was a copy of our robot so it was i mean our robot sophia looks exactly like the robot in the next

126:36machinist so is there good video that online yeah yeah yeah would tell jamie how do you get the good video oh just search for sophia hansen robot on google how advanced is sophia right now i mean how many different iterations have there been there's been something like 16 sofia robots made so far we're moving towards scalable manufacture over the next couple years so right right now she's going around sort of as an ambassador for humanoid robot kind giving giving speeches and and and talks in various places so she sophia used to be called eva or we had a robot like the current sophia that was called eva and then x-mastin that came out with a robot called eva that looked exactly like the robot that that my colleague david hansen and and i made i think it's a coincidence of course not they just copied it and i mean of course the the body they have is

127:30better and the ai is better in the movie than our our robot ai currently is so we change the name to sophia which means wisdom in instead but i mean was it freaky watching that though with the name ava i mean the thing is the moral of that movie is just if you know if a sociopath raises a robot with an abusive interaction it may come out to be a sociopath or a psychopath so let's let's let's not do that right let's raise our robots with love that's it loving compassion yeah you see the thing is that we hear i haven't seen this particularly this is great what is she saying just being rude to her let me carry on i'm weird about that she's not happy look no no she how much is it actually interacting with them it has a chat system english accent it really has a nice ring now i have to make clear that i didn't come out so yes sofia we can run using many different ai systems so there

128:43there's a chat bot which is sort of like you know alexa or or google now or something yeah but with a bit a bit better ai and interaction with with you know emotion and face recognition and so forth so it's not human level ai but it is responding to it yeah yeah it's it's have no it understands what you say and it comes up with an answer and it can look you in the eye and i mean speak more than one language well right now we can load it in english mode chinese mode or russian mode and there's sort of different different software packages and we also use her sometimes to experiment with their open cog system and singularitynet so we can we can use the robot as a research platform if you're exploring some of our more advanced ai tools and then there's a simpler chatbot software which is used for appearances like like like that one and in the next year we want to roll out

129:39more of our advanced research software from opencog and singularitynet roll out more of that inside these robots which is one among many applications we're looking at with our our singularitynet platform i want to get you back in here in like a year and find out where everything is because i feel like we need someone like you to like to sort of let us know where where it's at when it's when the switch is about to flip it seems to me that it might happen so quickly and the change might take place so rapidly that we would really we'll have no idea what's happening before it happens i mean we think about the singularity like it's going to be some huge like physical event and suddenly everything turns purple in this cover with diamonds or something right but i mean there's a lot of ways something like this could unfold so like imagine that with our our singularity

130:37net decentralized ai network you know we get an ai that's smarter than humans and can create you know a new scientific discovery of the nobel prize level every minute there's something that that doesn't mean this ai is going to immediately like refactor all matter into into images of uh buckethead or do something random right i mean i mean if the ai has some carrying and wisdom and and compassion then whatever changes happen but is there are those human characteristics not necessarily in fact human compassion just as humans are neither the most intelligent nor the most compassionate possible creatures that that's possible that's pretty clear if you look at the world around you sure and one one of our projects that we're doing with the sofia robot is aimed exactly at ai compassion this is called the loving ai project and we're using the sofia robot as a as

131:33a meditation assistant so so we we're using sofia to help people get into deep like meditative trance states and and help them you know breathe deeply and achieve more more positive state of being and part of the goal there is to help people part of the goal as as the ai gets more and more intelligent you're sort of getting the ai locked into a very positive reflective and compassionate state and i think i think there's a lot of things in the human psyche and evolutionary history that hold us back from being optimally compassionate and that if we create the ai in the right way it will be not only much more intelligent but much more compassionate than than human beings are and i mean this we'd better do that like otherwise the human race is probably screwed to be blunt i mean if i think human beings are creating a lot of other technologies now with a lot of power

132:31we're creating synthetic biology we're creating nano technology you know we're creating smaller and smaller nuclear weapons and we can't control their proliferation we're poisoning our environment i think if we can't create something that's not only more intelligent but more wise and compassionate than we are we're probably going to destroy ourselves by some method or another i mean with something like donald trump becoming president you see what happens when this you know primitive you know hindbrain and when our our unchecked you know mammalian emotions of anger and and you know status seeking and ego and rage and lust when these things are controlling these highly advanced technologies this this is not going to come to a good end so we want compassionate general intelligences and this is what we should be orienting ourselves toward and so we need to shift the focus

133:27of the ai and technology development on the planet toward you know benevolent compassionate general intelligence and this is subtle right because you need to work with the establishment rather than overthrowing it which isn't going to be viable so this is why we're creating this decentralized self-organizing ai network the singularity net then we're creating a for-profit company singularity studio which will get large enterprises to use this decentralized network then we're creating these robots like sofia which will be mass manufactured in the next couple years roll these out as service robots everywhere around the world to interact with people in a you know providing valuable services in homes and offices but also interacting with people you know in a loving and and compassionate way so we we need to start now because we don't actually know if it's going to be years or decades before

134:25we get to this singularity and we want to be assured as we can that when we get there it happens in a in a beneficial way for everyone right and things like robots blockchain and ai learning algorithms are our tools toward that end well ben i appreciate your optimism i appreciate coming in here explaining all this stuff for us and all right i appreciate all your work man it's really amazing fascinating stuff yeah yeah well thanks for having me it's it's a really fun uh wide-ranging conversation so yeah it would it would be great to come back next year and do it update you on the state of the singular schedule once a year and just by the time you come maybe who knows a year from now the world might be a totally different place i may be a robot but it might be a road you might be robot all right thank you thank you everybody