How to prevent AI from ‘annihilating humanity’ using blockchain – Cointelegraph Magazine

When he’s not working on hastening humanity’s rush toward the Singularity by creating an artificial general intelligence (AGI), Ben Goertzel plays in a jazz-rock band called Jam Galaxy fronted by a robot named Desdemona.

It’s one of his many side projects, which naturally led him to try and tokenize the music business by reaching out to members of Pearl Jam and Heart. Goertzel is also working on longevity research by crowdsourcing human health data with token rewards via an app called Rejuve.ai. That information is then pooled with animal and insect study data and analyzed with an AI to determine which parts of the genomes can make us live longer and then stimulated using gene therapies. “We’ve had some quite striking breakthrough-level discoveries,” he says. Oh, and just before our hour-long interview winds up, he casually mentions as an aside that he’s also creating a stablecoin for his decentralized AI marketplace, Singularity.net, that’s pegged to a synthetic index of environmental progress — because pegging it to U.S. dollars would be “lame.” 

“Progress on the environment is very stable. It never goes anywhere,” he points out.

“And to manipulate this, you have to actually solve global warming.”

It’s the exact sort of political comment meets high-tech know-how you might expect from Goertzel, who looks and sounds like a hippie scientist who stumbled into a time machine in 1971 and emerged fully formed in 2023. But don’t be fooled by the animal print hat, long hair and Electric Kool-Aid acid trip drawl: He’s a brilliant scientist with a grasp of the future light years ahead of most and who’s grappling with some of the biggest concepts humanity has ever considered. What is consciousness? How do we create artificial life, and what happens if it doesn’t like us, goes rogue, and guns everybody down like in Terminator 2?

What is artificial general intelligence?

Goertzel popularized the term “artificial general intelligence” as a way to differentiate a genuine thinking machine that could learn pretty much anything, to AIs that are optimized for one particular task, like the Deep Blue computer that famously beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov. He freely concedes there are risks in building a machine that’s capable of learning anything and everything, including how to reprogram itself to become an order of magnitude more intelligent than any human.

“There’s a number of risks and dangers with AGI,” says Goertzel over the din at an Indian restaurant in a busy shopping center in Singapore. “One of them that’s gotten a lot of media attention is that AGI will run amok and annihilate humanity and take over the universe. It’s entirely possible; you can’t rule it out,” he says.

“Another more probable risk is that nasty selfish people will use AI to exert their own greed and control over other people.”

In his view, governments are unlikely to make breakthroughs in AGI as they are “too conservative and stupid,” though he notes China contracts out its AGI work to companies like Tencent and Baidu. Closer to home, he thinks Google and Facebook’s AI divisions won’t get over the line either, as they’ll be too focused on making the AI hit certain metrics, which is not conducive to creative thought. 

“Just like the most brilliant people don’t want to merely serve someone else’s metrics, I think artificial general intelligence doesn’t necessarily want to maximize click-through on someone’s web page either, right? It’s got to be allowed to play around creatively.”

The Singularity circa 1970

Goertzel started university at 15, graduated at 18, had a doctorate by 22 and a young family by 23. Perhaps unusually in this day and age, he wasn’t just a math whiz or tech genius who soldered kit computers together in the ‘70s but was equally interested in philosophy, creative writing and music.

He spent much of his career teaching and researching computer science, mathematics and cognitive science at various universities around the globe while working on AI tech whenever he could. A serial founder who tends to be about a decade ahead of everyone else with his ideas — which, in business, famously equates to being wrong — he’s worked on using AI to predict financial markets and longevity, and he’s also had a stint as the chief scientist of Hanson Robotics, where he gave Sophia the Robot her artificial brain.