50 Quotes From Ben Goertzel, AI AGI Singularity Visionary Thinker

Dr. Ben Goertzel is a computer scientist, AI researcher, author, and creator of humanoid robots like Sophia and Desdomena, who coined the term AGI in 2003. As the founder of SingularityNET, he is at the forefront of decentralising AI and creating new forms of intelligence. Here are 50 insightful quotes from Ben Goertzel, drawn from a series of interviews I conducted with him, including "Ben Goertzel - SingularityNET - AI, AGI, SingularityNET ASI Alliance, Humanoids, Robots + Desdemona," "Interview with Ben Goertzel: AI Mastermind, Founder of SingularityNET - What Kind of Mind Can We Engineer?" and "AI, Robotics, Singularity, and Deep Tech - The Next Frontier." and other sources. 

Ben Goertzel is the ultimate visionary – a thinker and doer who has made significant contributions as a computer scientist, artificial intelligence researcher, humanoid robot creator, and businessman. He played a pivotal role in popularising the term Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Renowned for his work, Goertzel is the mastermind behind Sophia, the humanoid robot, and Desdemona, one of the world's most advanced AI-driven creative robots. As the founder and CEO of SingularityNET, he is deeply committed to democratising access to AI through decentralisation.

Ben Goertzel has authored over 64 books, with his most notable work being ‘The End of the Beginning: Life, Society and Economy on the Brink of the Singularity.'  In this book he highlights a deep, diverse edited volume addressing critical issues surrounding the future of humanity and intelligence, with chapters contributed by leading futurist thinkers and doers.

I have collected 50 insightful quotes from Ben Goertzel, drawn from a series of interviews I conducted with him, including "Ben Goertzel - SingularityNET - AI, AGI, SingularityNET ASI Alliance, Humanoids, Robots + Desdemona," "Interview with Ben Goertzel: AI Mastermind, Founder of SingularityNET - What Kind of Mind Can We Engineer?" and "AI, Robotics, Singularity, and Deep Tech - The Next Frontier." and other sources. 

Ben was one of the first computer scientists to deeply research the Singularity and the AGI impact and its disruptive vision(s) in society. His work in artificial intelligence / AGI made him one of the most influential researchers and he established the concept of AGI research activity as early as in 2005, advocating for the ‘publication of preliminary results’ and pushing forward the exploration of AGI's potential.

Currently, Goertzel’s primary focus is the SingularityNET project (http://singularitynet.io), which integrates AI and blockchain to create a decentralised open market for artificial intelligence. His ongoing research seeks to expand the medium for the development and emergence of AGI, providing superior AI-as-a-service to a variety of vertical markets, and enabling people around the world to contribute to and benefit from AI.

Ben Goertzel’s passions are wide-ranging, including AGI, life extension biology, robotics, humanoids, the philosophy of mind, psi, consciousness, complex systems, improvisational music, experimental fiction, theoretical physics, and metaphysics. His work spans across many disciplines, continually contributing to the evolution of our understanding of intelligence, both human and artificial. 

Ben Goertzel's work and research and general links to his various pursuits present and past, see his website http://goertzel.org 

Following are my choice of Ben Goertzel quotes

1) “Humans will merge with technology, to a rapidly increasing extent. This is a new phase of the evolution of our species, just picking up speed about now. The divide between natural and artificial will blur, then disappear. Some of us will continue to be humans, but with a radically expanded and always growing range of available options, and radically increased diversity and complexity. Others will grow into new forms of intelligence far beyond the human domain.” 

2) “We will develop sentient AI and mind uploading technology. Mind uploading technology will permit an indefinite lifespan to those who choose to leave biology behind and upload. Some uploaded humans will choose to merge with each other and with AIs. This will require reformulations of current notions of self, but we will be able to cope.”

3) “We will spread to the stars and roam the universe. We will meet and merge with other species out there. We may roam to other dimensions of existence as well, beyond the ones of which we're currently aware.”

4) “We will develop interoperable synthetic realities (virtual worlds) able to support sentience. Some uploads will choose to live in virtual worlds. The divide between physical and synthetic realities will blur, then disappear.”

5) “We will develop spacetime engineering and scientific "future magic" much beyond our current understanding and imagination.”

6) “Spacetime engineering and future magic will permit achieving, by scientific means, most of the promises of religions -- and many amazing things that no human religion ever dreamed of. Eventually we will be able to resurrect the dead by "copying them to the future".

7)” Intelligent life will become the main factor in the evolution of the cosmos, and steer it toward an intended path.”

8) “Radical technological advances will reduce material scarcity drastically, so that abundances of wealth, growth and experience will be available to all minds who so desire. New systems of self-regulation will emerge to mitigate the possibility of mind-creation running amok and exhausting the ample resources of the cosmos. “

9)” New ethical systems will emerge, based on principles including the spread of joy, growth and freedom through the universe, as well as new principles we cannot yet imagine.”

10) “All these changes will fundamentally improve the subjective and social experience of humans and our creations and successors, leading to states of individual and shared awareness possessing depth, breadth and wonder far beyond that accessible to “legacy humans.”

(These 10 quotes / thoughts are part of Ben Goertzel “Ten Cosmist Convictions” source “A Beneficial AGI Manifesto” source https://bengoertzel.substack.com/p/a-bgi-manifesto )

11) “The time to create beneficial Artificial General Intelligence (BGI) at the human level (and soon after, far beyond) is here.”

12) “The core challenge we face today is to guide the development of advanced AGI in a beneficial direction — beneficial for humans and also for other sentient beings, including the animals and plants on the planet today and the new life-forms that will emerge in the AGI era.”

13) “Because I think the latter is the way that we get to a beneficial AGI. The way we get to an AGI is to go through human beings, and that respects the rights and the beauty and the welfare of other sentient beings.”

14) "The fact that SciHub and Liben Bit Torrent are there indicates that the takeover of the internet by a few big governments and big tech companies is not actually complete."

15) "I think the internet is still open and hasn't been taken over, which is instructive as the power of decentralised protocols regarding AI."

16) "If you're looking at the growth of a decentralised global brain... the best chance to get the first AGI to be beneficial to our species is if the AI has its value system infused by a great variety and diversity of human perspectives.”

17) "The way people deal with LLM security is to try to bolt on security after the LLM is done, but we built security into the architecture of the LLM itself."

18) "Generative AI network with security baked into the underlying architecture and training mechanism, which is a different approach from the norm."

19) "If you train a neural net using evolutionary learning or predictive coding, you can get non-entangled representations that make it easier for the AI to introspect and understand its own actions."

20) "The generality of intelligence is a gradation, not a binary distinction... even the smartest reasoning LLMs don't have a level of generality that a human does."

21) "Open-source and decentralised communities have an advantage when it comes to security, as more people look at bugs and integrate security mechanisms, similar to how Linux works."

22) "With our team at ASI alliance... we are the biggest AGI effort outside of big tech, exploring a broader variety of AI algorithms and cognitive algorithms."

23) "An LLM is pretty general in what it can do, but it's not able to make creative and imaginative leaps beyond its preparation in the way that a person can."

24) "The human-level AGI barrier is arbitrary, more like the escape velocity of Earth... it's just a milestone in AGI's progression as they get smarter."

25) “I think it's entirely possible that a decentralized AI project can cobble together the data and compute power to make something smarter than anything big tech has done in the AI space leveling leveraging intellectual effort from people all all over the planet right and indeed that's what we're trying to do in SingularityNET and in the ASI alliance”

26) "SingularityNET is somewhat unsexily described as a middleware layer between the hardware and AI systems, aiming to provide an alternative to deploying AI algorithms on centralised clouds like AWS or Azure."

27) "We’re building a decentralised AI infrastructure where AI systems are deployed across different nodes, communicating with each other, running on a constellation of machines that can be owned and controlled by different people."

28) "Blockchain is the best technology we have today for coordinating a large global network of machines without a central owner or controller."

29) "In 2017, we launched the AGI token, and since then we’ve been building out decentralised AI infrastructure in parallel with developing concrete AGI systems like Hyperon."

30) "We’re not the only ones to think about decentralised AI — projects like Fetch.ai and Ocean Protocol were also exploring these concepts in 2017-18."

31) "The ASI Alliance is an unusual merger where different organisations like Singularity, Fetch, Ocean, and Cudos remain distinct but merged their tokens into one, now called the ASI token for artificial super intelligence."

32) "The ASI chain, launching later this summer, is the first layer 1 blockchain designed specifically for decentralised AGI, with the smart contract language Meta, the same AGI programming language we've developed."

33) "By having different shards of the ASI chain dedicated to different types of AI — from decentralised finance to training neural models — we can tailor the infrastructure for specific AI tasks."

34) "Not everything you would do at the AI level needs to be a smart contract, but having that portability between the AI level and the infrastructure level is great for flexibility."

35) "AI tools themselves have become accelerators of AI progress, making the work faster and faster — this is an indication that the singularity is indeed near."

36) "I think having a humanoid robot as one of the embodiments of your in-development proto AGI... can be valuable for building out its knowledge base and its value system."

37) "Having been around for the creation of Sophia and participating in the development of this Mindchild bort,  It’s just remarkable how much faster this development can happen now than a year ago."

38) "Humanoid robotics is becoming popular post DeepSeek for mostly kind of shallow and commercial reasons where people are like, 'Well, if there's no software, what can we invest in?'"

39) "The main bottlenecks in humanoid robotics are actually software bottlenecks, not hardware bottlenecks."

40) "Interactive storytelling with the robot helps the AI enter into the same mind space as a human child while being there in the same physical space."

41) "There's still this one big heroic task for humans to come together and cooperate in building AGI, but now is the time to do it. We're at a very interesting time for AI developers to jump in... within a couple of months the super fast version is going to be dealing with practical problems”

42) “I am actively working to bring BGI about, sooner rather than later.   And I think you probably should be too.”

43) “The economic and value of increasingly powerful — and increasingly generally intelligent — AI has become clear both to major socioeconomic actors and to everyday people.”

44) “While there are those who want to pause or radically slow down AGI R&D for fear of its consequences, it seems very unlikely these “decels” will hold sway.   There is just too much obvious and broad value already being generated by AI development that is explicitly intended as part of the path to AGI.”

45) “The core challenge we face today is to guide the development of advanced AGI in a beneficial direction — beneficial for humans and also for other sentient beings, including the animals and plants on the planet today and the new life-forms that will emerge in the AGI era.”

46) “We do not have a clear picture regarding how much influence our specific actions will have on the nature of the Singularity we get.  It may be that certain sorts of AGI or ASI are very likely to emerge without close dependence on the details of their early stages.  However, it seems intelligent to at least pursue the hypothesis that, by being purposive about the nature of the early-stage AGI we create, we can nudge the following stages of AGI evolution in beneficial ways.”

47) “The more we can be our best selves' (which includes becoming less attached to our “selves” as traditionally conceived) in the coming period, the more likely we are to make judicious choices as we move toward AGI and then ASI.”

48) ”Current AI technologies like LLMs and convolutional neural networks are focused on effective absorption of large-scale training data and fulfilment of queries based on the information in this data.”    

49) “This sort of technology, on its own, seems clearly not capable of producing HLAGI — but does seem very promising as a component of integrated multi-module AGI systems.  This sort of technology is also not capable of real moral agency or ethical understanding.”

50) “The concept of open-ended intelligence is also important to reflect on.   The fundamental nature of AGI systems is to pursue the complementary and sometimes contradictory meta-goals of individuation (maintenance of system boundaries) and self-transcendence (growing beyond oneself and leaping into the great unknown) … and this means that whatever algorithms one uses to seed an AGI, it is highly possible that as it grows and learns and reflects on its own nature and improves its own software and hardware infrastructure, it will end up with different algorithms entirely.”   

Sources:

Ben Goertzel - Ben Goertzel founder and CEO of SingularityNET, the OpenCog Foundation, ASI, and the AGI Society. He was the Chief Scientist of Hanson Robotics, the company that created the Sophia robot.

https://businessabc.net/wiki/ben-goertzel 

Ben Goertzel books https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/446589.Ben_Goertzel  

https://www.linkedin.com/in/bengoertzel/

https://www.azquotes.com/quote/720803

https://www.azquotes.com/author/43808-Ben_Goertzel