Ben Goertzel: AI Meets the Metaverse: Teachable AI Agents Living in Virtual Worlds
I just met Ben Goertzel at the Singularity Summit 2010 SF. I learned a lot from him face-to-face and I've been catching up with his cutting-edge game AGI work. As a starting point into his decades of research, I recommend this article Ben Goertzel wrote: a fascinating piece on games as the frontier of AGI and and his Nova Mente framework for AGI in virtual worlds on KurzeilAI.net:
Online virtual worlds have the power to accelerate and catalyze the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI). As AGIs involved in this metaverse become progressively more intelligent from their interaction with the social network of human beings and reach human-level intelligence (the Singularity), they will already be part of the human social network. If we build them right and teach them right, they will greet us with open arms.
I am one of the minority of the human race who believes that a technological Singularity is almost surely coming. And, as this essay hopefully has made clear, I am also part of an even smaller minority who believes that the most probable path for the Singularity’s arrival involves AGI in the online metaverse. I suspect that both of these minorities will become larger and larger as the next decade unfolds.
Right now we have a handful of people working on Novamente full time. What we’re doing now – as well as building out the basic AI -- is teaching Novamente to be a virtual baby. It lives in a 3D simulation world and tries to learn simple stuff like playing fetch and finding objects. It’s a long way from there to the Singularity – but there’s a definite plan for getting from here to there.
The current staffing of the project is not enough. If we keep going at this rate, we’ll get there eventually – but we won’t have the Singularity in ten years.
But I still think we can do it – I’m keeping my fingers crossed. We don’t need a Manhattan Project scale effort, all we need right now is the funding to get a dozen or so of the right people on the project full time.
I’ve talked more about AI than about the Singularity or positiveness. Let me get back to those.
It should be obvious that if you can create an AI vastly smarter than humans, then pretty much anything is possible.
