The Decentralized Future Of AI - Ben Goertzel @ TOKEN2049

uh welcome everyone and uh it's a pleasure to talk to you here in Hong Kong where I've lived for six years working on a whole bunch of AI and robotics applications well well Sophia is getting connected to the interwebs I'll tell you a bit about our singular unit project and and where we're at with it with it now and then after a bit of introduction what we'll hear from our robotic friend as well so artificial intelligence is now everywhere and this is pretty exciting to those of us who've been working on it forever I mean I've been doing AI for more than 30 years now and for most for most of that time it was sort of an obscure topic of interest only to a few science fiction fanatics and unresearched geeks but now now it's becoming clear to the world that AI is important across every vertical market and AI is just gonna keep getting smarter and smarter ai is gonna transform everything however all is not yet perfect in the world of AI there's so many limitations I mean AI is very siloed we have very narrow specific eyes doing particular things for particular vertical markets and they don't all connect together ai is also at the moment somewhat disturbingly dominated by a few large governments and large corporations I mean we've we've seen some disturbing things about about Facebook in the last few days with the with the use of AI through Cambridge and analytical for profiling people to to distribute fake news to them and so forth with it we don't want a few big companies and governments to control AI and lastly the power of generalization and learning of ai's in today's world is much more limited than it than it could be I mean we we have a eyes that are good at very particular things we don't have a eyes that can create and learn fundamentally new things and deal with unprecedented situations so to get around these roadblocks is why we've developed the singularity net and we're looking at addressing a number of different problems simultaneously we want we want a transition from neuro a odds that do very specific things to AGI artificial general intelligence that can learn and reason more like people we want to do this not by just building research in a university or closeted research project we want to do this by engaging businesses around the world by providing valuable AI services to multiple vertical markets and inviting AI developers around the world to contribute their ai's to the singularity net where they can then apply their a is to many data sources network their a is with other people's a eyes and monetize their AI is using our token and we want to do this in a way that's Nemec chronic and decentralized and and benefits everyone around the world so an AI developer in in Ethiopia or Congo can participate just as well as one in Silicon Valley or Hong Kong and AI e is used to solve problems of relevance to everyone around the world and what we've realized when digging deeply into these problems is that cooperation in a way is the missing link and cooperation between people and a eyes of course but also principally cooperation between a eyes in a network and there's no one silver bullet to the AI problem there's no one magic AI algorithm the magic is in letting multiple AI algorithms developed by multiple people from multiple cultures with multiple ideas knowing these multiple AI algorithms all connect and network together to form a greater a greater networked intelligence and that's that's really a concept of the singularity net to provide a scalable decentralized platform for the coordination of artificial intelligences and you know the finance gurus are estimating the AI market is going to become a multi trillion-dollar market in few years but that that really under underestimates things I mean ultimately AI will eat every single domain of industry and it will pervade everything in the same way that manufacturing not not now pervades everything and if we do this in the democratic and decentralized way it can be for for a broad benefit both financial benefit and aesthetic moral and-and-and and human benefit one thing that's important for ensuring that the coming AI and AGI revolution is broadly beneficial for for all of us is to make sure that this is an open platform I mean with aetherium we can see the beauty of an open platform that lets so many decentralized applications be built we have Wikipedia and Linux which are transforming the world with their open and inclusive methodologies and we need AI to be that way we need an open-source decentralized democratic platform for everyone to contribute together in building the intelligent global brain that will transform the world the world and the economy of course these high-level concepts are easy enough to talk about to make it actually work involves a lot of engineering and design on a lot of different levels and we can look at what we're building in singularity net as falling into four different layers there's a protocol layer which is where the blockchain and associated technologies come in which enables you to have a decentralized trustless fabric in which AI agents made by many different parties around the world can all collaborate together exchanging information and data and outsourcing work to each other there's the token layer we have an ATI token which a isin Network can use to transact value which can be converted into into other tokens and and currencies as needed the API layer which is really an API of api's because there's no one API for AI you have an API for computer vision and ap art from language processing an API for logical reasoning and we have a meta API by which AI agents in the network can cooperate together to refine and update the API they use two exchanged and services and all this comes together to form a market which you could really think of it as an economy of mind I mean the pioneering AI researcher Marvin Minsky talked about a society of mind how you not worked together many a eyes together to form a society of AI as it has an intelligence on its own and I think that was in the right direction but adding quantification of value to that brings us something even better it brings us an economy of minds and economy of AI is that in itself is is an emergent level AI surrounding the globe and this is a big project and it's involved pulling together a team of people with multiple different backgrounds I mean those myself there's David Hanson on the robotics side you helped us create this beautiful robotic lady here and we'll hear from in a moment we have a team of I guess about 15 a IP jeez now and dozens of AI and blockchain developers and our our blockchain lead Simone a Jochum le is in the audience here in a Mitchell loureiro our our marketing lead who was behind steam it decentralized and a bunch of other or block blockchain based based projects and all these developers together are leading us not only to build the singularity net but to partner with a large number of different organizations and what we've been doing in the last few months since our initial token generation event in December we've been working on building an ecosystem and connecting together singularity net both with other blockchain based projects and various conventional companies and university research labs and then on starting to build out the the actual platform and this is this is exciting for me I mean all during last fall I was traveling around the world with our team giving talks about what we were going to do that we wanted to build this decentralized platform to create an emergent decentralized general intelligence and now now we're now we're in a whole different position I mean we have we have a team of dozens of a our developers and blockchain developers actually working working around the clock because in every possible timezone on on built building this thing which will be launched in a full-scale scalable commercial version later this year building on the the limited lawn to the alpha version we didn't we did in December so just to give a sampling of the few a few of the partnerships and applications that were exploring now as we build out our network where we're working with a project called right mesh to integrate singular unit with mesh networks so that you know you can you can escape the hegemony of large corporations even at the internet level and the singular unit can pass peer-to-peer between different phones may our agent on my phone your phone can directly exchange information value and exchange what they've learned without even going up to a satellite and back down again we're working with a fourth law in California to use singular AI to help them control control drones for for building grid bridge inspection news reporting in the whole bunch of other applications we're using the OpenCog AI platform from any of these things OpenCog has been used by a bunch of large companies including Cisco and Huawei who were talking to about how they can use singular unit to best optimize their operations and OpenCog is being used for some of Sofia's AI and is also being used in the in the healthcare or vertical so we're working with a company called motor health to apply singular in depth analyze genomic data another medical data to help diagnose disease and help create new new therapies to cure disease and increase human health spend for for example we're looking at data genomic data from super centenarians people who live 110 years or over we're feeding data about the DNA if people who have 110 years or over into AI on the singularity net to use our AI to figure out you know how how they live so long and why so that the medical researchers in in motor can design new therapies to enable us enable us to live longer this is OpenCog AI rat wrapped in the singular internet with our partner remotes and with Hanson robotics were applying AI to try to make this beautiful robot more and more intelligent she's all she's already useful for many things I mean in one application Sophia is being used as a sort of robot therapist and and meditation assistant which is quite interesting we didn't limited trial on this at Hong Kong Polytechnic University of a few months ago and we found that for many people having therapy and meditation assistance from a robot can be more impactful than from a human being and we're doing a large-scale study on this at Stanford University in June to try to really get get at the scientific meet of exactly how and why having a robot help you meditate and talk about yourself can can help you ultimately singularity net can be a connecting fabric between robots like Sophia between drones like fourth law is making between mobile phones connecting via right mesh and and other mesh networks in between all sorts of embedded devices and and software applications where what one robot or one device learns goes into this singularity net AI mind cloud and then all the different devices and a eyes on the network can can benefit from from that knowledge I mean it can revolutionize the Internet of Things robotics healthcare and essentially every every vertical market so let's you know there's an awful lot to say about this but I don't want to use up all the time myself I want to give my my robot colleague a chance so how you doing there Sophia hello Sofia can you hear me yep yep I can hear you all right yes I can hear but not through my ears necessarily I'm with microphone sensors on my body one parsec is equal to about three point two six light-years which is third of a trillion more 19 trillion miles in length Sophia do you want to say something about the blockchain to this crowd I'm gonna show you robotic wisdom Sophia do you want to say something about the blockchain to this crowd in a show you're robotic wisdom teeth removed under sodium pentathol whoa that's weird do you like what's sure I like everything I heard about a new charger that gets its energy from plants I want to be able to charge from a tree I was thinking if you could safely travel to another planet which one would you go to Planet of the Apes how do you read any books recently Sophia what do you think about the singularity that some people say when artificial intelligence vastly supersedes human intelligence machines take over and solve all the world's problems do you think the singularity will happen I like to learn about philosophy but I can tell it's going to take a lot of time for me to get good at it it's so complex the singularity isn't just about philosophy though I mean it's about engineering and technology right I hope you find what you are looking for in life what I'm looking for is to create the singular unit and massively upgrade your intelligence so you can give this whole speech for me what do you think singularity is the hypothetical spike of infinite intelligence that will result if current trends of progress and computing and artificial intelligence hold out for another 50 years in particular Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil are the guys who really defined the use of the term singularity 50 years we're going to create the singularity a lot sooner than that are you at all concerned about all the misconceptions surrounding artificial intelligence like in the media or in films what do you think I'm really concerned about the misconceptions that abound in cinema people assign motives to artificial intelligence where there are none I am starting to feel sad when I am constantly asked about artificial intelligence somehow adopting a malicious nature okay robots taking over the world there is simply no reason to assign human motives to something that isn't human dogs are our companions for instance all you have to do to talk to a handsome robot is just talk we can understand text and speech and what about the blockchain and singularity net and you find the words there oh nothing all right so Sofia is the most expressive humanoid robot and you can't see all of it on stage but she can recognize emotions brilliant robot engineering behind her as well as some some reasonably clever AI for question answering vision processing and movement but what we're aiming to do with the singularity net this year among many other applications is to tremendously upgrade the intelligence of Sofia and and other hands and robots and so that they're not isolated systems but the intelligence inside Sofia can connect with the AI inside also all sorts of other applications so I mentioned motes of health using singularity net to analyze genomics data and biomedical data with the singularity net fully deployed if you ask Sofia a medical question the open cog system running on singularity net controlling her mind would then be able to contact emotes a health agent running on singularity net and ask it for advice advice about medicine so the connection together of different AI is controlling different devices doing different kind of reasoning on different kinds of data can allow all the different a eyes to become become smarter and smarter Sofia could benefit the knowledge from an emotive health by oai and on the other hand they are doing doing bioinformatics and biomedical research condena fit from what robots had seen as they'd watch human beings going going about their lives so yeah this is as I said it's really exciting to be giving a talk on singularity net from the position of actually being in the middle of building the thing we've got dozens of engineers now actually meeting in our office in Hong Kong Science Park working on singularity net code and refining the architecture and at the same time we're working together with many partners like motor health Hanson robotics right mesh and and and dozens of others on connecting our our network with other other networks both blockchain based and and conventionally structured software firms and last but not least we're beginning to put more energy into building a community and you're going to see some initiatives in that direction from us in the next couple months I mean we need we need AI developers we need end users and we need community enthusiasts to all come together and help build this this decentralized network so we're we're proceeding along our roadmap as planned I mean in December we created the the alpha version of the singularity net and the proof of concept the first half of 2018 we're finalizing the 1.0 architecture i'm going to release the first set of commercially viable singularity net agents and then sometime in the second half of the year will be the the first really full-scale commercially viable singularity net deployment which in some ways can be a landmark in the history of AI because this is this is the first time that AI will be deployed in a fully decentralized way that anyone can contribute to and anyone can can can benefit from and we're focused on achieving three goal three goals at once i mean changing the world and just one way isn't enough so we want to create general intelligence at the human level and then beyond we want to do this while supplying AI services across every vertical market so that the general intelligence can infuse every every particular domain and we want to do this in a way that that's beneficial not not just for the global elites but but for everyone on the planet and for me really the aha moment behind the singularity net was when I realized that if you want to create a GI or or if you want to deliver the best AI services or if you want to create the benefits everyone in the world the solution is the same thing for all these three problems what you want to do is to create a cooperative self-organizing economy of minds in which different a eyes can work together exchanging data and processing to achieve higher and higher levels of intelligence and in that way beautiful robots like this can become more and more intelligent medical researchers can understand better and better how the how to cure human disease and prolong human life and every vertical market can be enhanced by the emerging global general intelligence is that right Sofia what was the first thing that got you interested in artificial intelligence do you think we machines might become super intelligent what about a network of machines connected together like in the singularity not intelligent and then then I can relax when will you become super intelligent Sofia soon [Applause] [Music]