turtlethink.com » Archive » Ben Goertzel: roundup of AGI-09, The Second Conference on Artificial General Intelligence

Ben Goertzel: roundup of AGI-09, The Second Conference on Artificial General Intelligence

First off, let me congratulate h+ magazine for launching their new site this week! The design is great, the digital edition is actually very readable, and I know it will only get better as the community grows.

Ben Goertzel, an AGI researcher and CEO of Novamente, organized the conference and provided a very good roundup to readers of h+. He explains that the AGI conference is smaller and more intimate than other related gatherings because it specifically focuses on the “big picture:” human-level thinking machines.

“Since its founding in the 1950s and 1960s, the AI field has achieved great successes – to name just a few: the AI linguistics underlying Google and other search engines; the AI planning and scheduling software used throughout the military and industry; the AI fraud detection software underlying modern credit card operations; and the AI gaming software underlying everything from Deep Blue to the bots in massively multiplayer online games. Yet all these wonderful achievements have a common narrowness of scope, which is why inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil has characterized them as “narrow AI.” The grand goal of the original AI researchers – the creation of thinking machines with general intelligence at the human level and ultimately beyond — remains largely unaddressed. Many, both within and outside the AI field, have complained about this situation; the mission of the AGI conference series is to help do something about it.”

Reading Ben’s report makes one realize just how difficult it is to piece together highly-specialized aspects of learning, cognition, computer science, etc. to form something akin to a tapeworm – let alone a human mind. However, I’m confident that the eureka moment will come in our lifetime, even if we don’t fully understand how we got there, or how our creation will actually work…