After a year of increasingly dire warnings about the imminent demise of humanity at the hands of superintelligent artificial intelligence (AI), Magazine is in Panama at the Beneficial AGI Conference to hear the other side of the story.
Attendees include an eclectic mix of transhumanists, crypto folk, sci-fi authors including David Brin, futurists and academics.
We’re at the conference run by SingularityNET, a key member of the proposed new Artificial Superintelligence Alliance, to find out what happens if everything goes right with creating artificial general intelligence (AGI) — human-level, artificial general intelligence.
But how do we bring about that future, rather than the scenario in which Skynet goes rogue and kills us all?
One of the best insights into why those questions are so important comes from futurist Jose Luis Cordeiro, author of The Death of Death, who believes humanity will cure all diseases and aging thanks to AGI.
He tells Magazine of some sage wisdom that Arthur C. Clarke, the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, once told him.
“He said: ‘We have to be positive about the future because the images of the future — of what’s possible — begin with our minds. If we think we will self-destroy, most likely we will. But if we think that we will survive, [that] we will move into a better world [then we] will work toward that and we will achieve it.’ So it begins in our minds.”
Janet Adams, CEO of SingularityNET, warms the conference up with some yoga. (Fenton)
Beneficial AGI: The quest for artificial general intelligence
Humans are hardwired to focus more on the existential threats from AGI than on the benefits.
Evolutionary speaking, it’s better that our species worries nine times too often that the wind rustling in the bushes could be a tiger than it is to be blithely unconcerned about the rustling and get eaten by a tiger on the 10th occurrence.
Even the doomers don’t put a high percentage chance of AGI killing us all, with a survey of almost 3000 AI researchers suggesting the chance of an extremely bad outcome ranges from around 5% to 10%. So while that’s worryingly high, the odds are still in our favor.
Also read: Ben Goertzel profile — How to prevent AI from ‘annihilating humanity’ using blockchain
Opening the conference, SingularityNET founder and the “Father of AGI,” Dr. Ben Goertzel, paid tribute to Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin’s concept of defensive accelerationism. That’s the midpoint between the effective accelerationism techno-optimists and their “move fast and break things” ethos, and the decelerationists, who want to slow down or halt the galloping pace of AI development.
Goertzel believes that deceleration is impossible but concedes there’s a small chance things could go horribly wrong with AGI. So he’s in favor of pursuing AGI while being mindful of the potential dangers. Like many in the AI/crypto field, he believes the solution is open-sourcing the technology and decentralizing the hardware and governance.
Dr Ben Goertzel on keyboards with his surprisingly good robot-fronted band. (Fenton)
What is the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance?
This week SingularityNET announced it has teamed up with the decentralized multi-agent platform FetchAI — founded by DeepMind veteran Humayun Sheikh — and the data exchange platform Ocean Protocol to form the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance (ASI).
It will be the largest open-sourced independent player in AI research and development and has proposed merging SingularityNET, FetchAI and Ocean Protocol’s existing tokens into a new one called ASI. It would have a fully diluted market cap of around $7.5 billion — subject to approval votes over the next two weeks. The three platforms would continue to operate as separate entities under the guidance of Goertzel, with Sheikh as chair.
According to the Alliance, the aim is to “create a powerful compelling alternative to Big Tech’s control over AI development, use and monetization” by creating decentralized AI infrastructure at scale and accelerating investment into blockchain-based AGI.
What are the benefits of AGI?
Probably the most obvious beneficial impact is AGI’s potential to analyze huge swathes of data to help solve many of our most difficult scientific, environmental, social and medical issues.
We’ve already seen some amazing medical breakthroughs, with MIT researchers using AI models to evaluate tens of thousands of potential chemical compounds and discovered the first new class of antibiotics in 60 years, one that’s effective against the hitherto drug-resistant MRSA bacteria. It’s the sort of scaling up of research that’s almost impossible for humans to achieve.
And that’s all before we get to the immortality and mind-uploading stuff that the transhumanists get very excited about but which weirds most people out.
This ability to…
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