This is epicenter episode 275 with guest Ben goertzel.
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Hi, welcome to epicenter. My name is Sebastian Cujo and my
name is fine. Bob.
And Kay today, we have an interview with Banker.
It's all who is the CEO of Singularity that he also works
for a company called Hanson robotics.
Yes, you may have seen in the news and so Hanson robotics
makes this robot. This is going to humanoid robot
named Sofia. She's been featured and you know
on TV shows and Silicon Valley the sitcom and sort of has
become an ambassador for robotics.
It's a band is an expert in artificial intelligence and
Robotics and single learning. That is a company that is
building as the marketplace for AI on boshane.
So we talk to Ben about all kinds of interesting.
Topics that we don't usually get a chance to discuss on the show
since we primarily focus on watching but talking about AI in
a more General sense and what future is there, and how that
ties into block, shame is a really fascinating conversation
and that is is a great speaker on these topics and there's a
lot of thinking at a high level, so it's really fascinating to
get to interview him. The first, we got a couple of
announcements. So one one thing that you
mentioned is that We're going to be at least.
I will be at ECC week of March 4th.
So, this first box chain week, happening in Paris the whole
week. And so, I'll be a VC will also
be having a meet-up and I mean Up is on March 6th on the
Wednesday around 6:00. It's just going to be a casual
get-together and drinks Meetup venue.
Isn't totally figured out yet but it will be announced soon
and hope you hope to see you. There is going to be I'll be
there son. You might be there as well.
And you will have some guests and other listeners.
So happy, happy to have you with happy to have.
You join us for that meet up and you can sign up and register at
the center. Dot rocks, / EC, so that's
epicenter, not rocks /e. See if you register their will
send you the address for the venue when when it's a nest and
Brian, I think you had an update on course one.
Yeah, but first of all, that sounds great.
I'm so jealous. I wish I could be in Paris, too.
I think it's gonna be a really great conference.
I mean the first one that they had a couple years ago, we were
there together was terrific and I wasn't there for the
subsequent ones, but it's now grown to the organizers of told
me they're waiting for their were hoping to have 1,500 people
there. It's going to be at the canal
which is this really fantastic venue.
And yeah, 300 speakers. So it's it's turning out to be
quite a quite a Conference. Cool, fantastic.
But yeah. So I did want to give a brief
update on correspond so you know, as many listeners know,
most less than 0. So we've been mayor and I
started this company together. It's just over a year ago to
work on kind of building valid as proof State networks.
And finally, now, we are life in the first Network, which is
Project called Loom. So it's in the theorem
sidechain, sort of a plasma cash chain, you know, we did we did
an interview on this before as well.
And Using tenement as consensus. So we just launched share last
Friday and so you know, anyone who has Loom can delegate to us.
We also wrote this in death, kind of research report on the
room so if people want to check that out that's also available
and the Rue I will put the link to our website in the show know
so people can find everything there and then Cosmos is also
about to go live. So which is also something where
we'll have a valid. Later on and that brings us to
the other thing. We wanted to speak about which
is a first of all, we have a cosmos is starting to sponsor
epicenter. So that's very exciting and it's
starting to do. So if this episode now we do
need to make a disclaimer here which is that.
First of all, I have some atoms and save us.
He has some items to Sonny has atoms and met her as items to,
right? So, the epicenter team is fairly
Heavily. You know, has some atom
positions. And in addition to that, of
course only works for the cosmos team and I used to work for
Cosmo Steam and then mayor and I have Nelson building it Cosmos
validator. So we just wanted to give that
disclaimer upfront to people know that and fully aware of
that. And and that ties into a larger
topic which we've had a bunch of discussions about.
But we haven't really taken the necessary actions on, and it's
long. Long overdue for us to do that,
which is to have a better way of disclosing, those kind of
things. So what we will start doing and
we'll probably have to up within the next week or so is it's just
a page on a website where, you know, you'll be able to see all
of the hosts and and they will list all of the tokens or you
know, other kind of Investments they have in the blocked in
space and then I think the other thing will start doing this,
maybe in the show notes for every episode.
I mean, this is something we have been doing generally.
Like let's say there's an episode and like somebody has
this token, then we've generally been mentioning that probably
with the exception of Bitcoin and hearing episodes but but
they are we Just want to be more consistent.
They're really make sure you mention it every time and also
write it in the show notes. So that I think that's mentioned
the fact that we hold atoms. I guess, at least for me.
I've always been interested in Cosmos and I'm actually
generally quite excited that they're launching and so having
them become a sponsor. Just felt like a really natural
fit. And so I think you'll see the
add their intention to sponsor. The show is sort of benefit for
both one because You think the cosmos is a great platform and
people should generally have interested in and also the
cosmos team has always been very closely.
We're we've always been very close to that team and I've
always sort of appreciate what we done and they would say was
one of our early guest sort of things.
Yeah. So that I think you've said
enough on that and we'll have that page on our website within
about a week or so. And we'll make a point of also
mentioning in the show notes as you mentioned.
So without further delay, here's our interview with an earth
Style. Alright, so we're here with Ben
goertzel and Ben is the founder and CEO of Singularity.
Net is also Chief scientist and at Hanson, Robotics and holds a
number of positions in other organizations.
But we'll get to that in these interviews, been so high debt.
Thanks for joining us. Hey, it's a pleasure to be here.
Well, thank you for joining us. So, yeah, you have a very
impressive resume. So, as I mentioned, your the
background CEO of Singularity at your also Chief scientist is
handsome. Robot Two PhD in mathematics.
You've started a whole bunch of companies and lots of different
areas and you're involved in some nonprofits and Foundations
as well. So how did you, how did you get
here? And what, what is your
trajectory looks like? And how did you get involved in
Ai and Robotics? I've been interested in AI
robotics life, extension, nanotech, femto Tech time
travel, all these things since, you know, the early 1970s.
When I, when I was a little kid reading science fiction books
and you know, now a few decades have passed.
And I found myself in a world where many of these apparently
science fictional Technologies are are gradually becoming
reality. These and so, it's really,
really exciting to me to actually be every day, you know,
concretely, working on building thinking machines and networking
people and computers together into a, into a global brain and
applying AI to longevity and nanotechnology.
It's astounding that we live in a time when these things are
realities. And of course, it's also a bit.
Scary and sobering at times because these things could go
badly wrong or they could go. Amazingly.
Right? And you know, why I've been
involved in a lot of different aspects of all these
Technologies. Many of which are converging
together now. So, I did a PhD in in
mathematics but even at that time, I was very interested in
AI biotechnology and a bunch of other things.
I just figured mathematics. You know, as Bitcoin says, in
math, We Trust right mathematics underlie underlies, everything,
that's the foundation of all modern science and technology so
I figured learning a bunch of math.
Couldn't be bad. But since shortly after getting
my PhD, I've been really, which was 89.
I got my degree. I mean, since I've been working
on AI and in various dimensions and aspects.
And now in the last few years, that's really taken off along
with a bunch of other other Technologies and of course,
blockchain and cryptocurrency. Would you guys know a lot about?
This is all part of the mix. So, right now, there's a insane
number of different Advanced Technologies.
He's for manipulating creating different kinds of information
that are all intersecting and, and pushing each other forward.
And you could talk about these for hundreds of hours without
exhausting at all. Yeah, that's definitely true.
So, let's, let's spend a little bit of time first on the topic
of AI, which is something that I think, you know, if tangentially
talked about a bunch of times, but still, it's, I guess, like,
like probably for many outside of the Block Chain spaces, you
know, big scary term that's a little bit.
To kind of demystify. So how do you define a?
I And what's the difference between Ai and, you know, terms
that people use like machine learning and deep learning?
I don't think any of these terms are worth too much in in the
end. I mean AI.
I'm in what sense is it really artificial?
It's all part of Nature and to some extent, these systems are
evolving and emerging. Instead of being purely
artificially created and intelligence, we don't even have
a good definition for among humans.
Like, there's not an IQ test that works across different
cultures or ages of people, let alone Girls different kinds of
Minds. None of these are very rigorous
terms. I mean, machine learning again,
in essence, all AI really is about machines that learned.
And, and reason, and think that term has lately, come to be used
to describe particular types of AI algorithms that are trained
on on large amounts of data, but then the term is also used more
Loosely. So, you always reinforcement
learning a kind of machine. learning or not, it's not,
especially not, especially well, defined and I mean, deep deep
learning again, in cognitive science, you know, a guy named
Stella Nelson wrote a book on deep learning what 15 years ago,
which encompassed neural networks logic, systems
production systems, many kinds of AI algorithms but now now the
term seems to be used for what used to be called multi-layer
perceptrons multi-layer neural networks, which is really only
one special kind of Deep learning system and then in the
broader said. So I mean, what, what deep
learning originally meant was any system that just does
hierarchical pattern recognition, like recognizes
patterns within patterns within patterns within patterns in the
world and uses those to take some action.
The Deep Learning Systems being talked about, mostly now are
hierarchical neural networks, which is one special kind of
deep learning system in the brother.
Kay so I mean what we have is a lot of words with confusing
definitions that that that Shift over time and don't necessarily
mean what they sound like, they mean which, which comes back to
in math, We Trust. Right?
Because the thing is the algorithms are doing are doing
what they're doing and that there is a real mathematical
description to them which and they carry out practical
functions but the buzz words associated when them serve
mostly to sell things rather than to convey useful
information. Okay.
Okay that is helpful but then let's speak about About one
term. And I think that's the term that
maybe you have more relationship to which is a GI.
So artificial general intelligence.
Yeah, well let me let me try to go. to what I think are the
foundations here because I mean there, It is possible to
describe these things in a way that makes sense.
It's just that Things become marketing buzzwords, and then,
and then them become become confusing.
So I think Fundamentally. You can think about a mind or an
intelligent system as something that's recognizing patterns in
itself and in the world around it and then the system may have
some goals which doesn't mean everything.
It does is goal-directed, but it may have some goals and then
recognizes patterns regarding which actions will achieve which
goals in which contexts, right? So you have a pattern
recognition system. And it has goals among other
Dynamics and its trying to learn.
It starting to recognize patterns of how to achieve, what
goals and what situations. And you know babies do that,
right? Babies are recognizing patterns
in the world around them all the time and they have some goals
that they want to get some milk, some food they want to run
around, and they try to figure out what patterns of activity
will let them achieve their goals and what in what
situations and then where? I mean, we're deep learning.
Comes in is the world we live. In seems to be made largely of
hard rock, quickly, composed patterns, where you have
patterns that build up in the more complex ones going up into
more complex ones. I mean, just like physics builds
into chemistry builds into biology builds into psychology,
builds into sociology. So we have a hierarchically
composed patterns, which means if you have a learning engine
that is trying to recognize, Patterns in the hierarchy in May
well succeed. Because our world seems to be
seems to be built that way. Now it happens that Most of the
AI is out there in the world. Now are able to recognize
patterns in a very narrowly defined context and to achieve,
only a very narrow set of goals, like, Say the original alphago,
could recognize patterns in go games and it could achieve the
goal of winning, a go game, right?
And that was it now, Alpha zero with a step beyond that.
These programs are all by Google deepmind, which is one of the
more interesting AI organizations out.
There are 40, won't be on that because it can play a lot of
different kinds of board games. So it can recognize patterns in
a broader scope of environments and many, many different types
of board games and it can achieve more types of goals
because the ways of winning chess or go or shogi, whatever
are different, right? It's still not nearly as general
as a human being, though, because we can only play board
games We can recognize patterns in a huge number of other kinds
of environments and we can achieve many, many different
types of goals, like we can prove math.
Terms become blow people off. We can, we can chase girls.
We can, we can make art, we can try this, save starving kids,
there's a lot of goals. We can work toward in a fairly
Rich collection of environments but we're still not like
infinitely. General intelligence has you
could you can imagine a mind that could recognize patterns in
407 dimensional space, where very bad at that?
We're much better like two or three or four dimensions.
So we're still somewhat restricted.
We're good at recognizing patterns and some kinds of
environments. Achieving some kinds of goals
better than Alpha 0 or existing, AI programs.
But you can imagine some kind of mind that could recognize
patterns in like a space of any dimensions and in things that
just look like noise to human beings and they could achieve
goals that. Humans can't even begin to
understand to understand. So I think, you know, totally
general intelligence, that could recognize any kind of pattern in
any kind of world and could figure out how to achieve any
kind of goal by recognizing patterns of other achieve that
goal. That's probably not achievable
in this physical Universe, like totally general intelligence,
but we're much more General than any existing AI program like
each of us. Deal with a lot of different
problems. And if you give us something
totally new to do with like the internet didn't exist.
When I was born, let alone when the, my DNA evolved, that didn't
exist when I went to school, but I like, everyone else was able
to adapt to deal with this new thing, right?
We don't yet have a eyes that can transfer the knowledge and
adapt to deal. With some very new type of
thing, they weren't programmed or Or trained for right and I
think, I think we will but we're not there yet.
So I think now the AI field is starting to begin the transition
from narrow. A is that do highly specific
things recognize patterns and Achieve goals and very specific
domains toward more General II's that can just deal with a
broader scope of knowledge and a broader variety of goals and can
transfer. What they've learned so far, the
very different conditions. Missions.
And their, I mean this will be really important.
You see that would like self-driving cars now are
crashing into people because they're seeing situations that
weren't in their training data. I mean that's a failure to
failure to generalize right? And then in financial markets
when you have what's called a regime change, oh, suddenly the
markets acting totally different than it was acting before.
Well again current quantitative Financial prediction systems and
risk management systems have failed to generalize right
there. They were trained on previous
Market regimes. When you give them a new market
regime. No, they're still acting on
their on their previous knowledge.
Now of course most people can't deal with the new market regime
either. But at least foundationally we
do have the ability to like go back to basics and deal with it,
radically new new situation and that's that's a big A big
challenge facing the a, I filled in the next phase, which I think
we're going to meet but it says, still some research challenges
there. That's interesting.
I've never considered that way that.
Yeah I guess that like humans and carbon-based beings are good
at recognizing certain types of patterns and I guess you could
maybe differentiate. So like humans are good at
recognizing certain path types of patterns and acting on them
and that might be different from.
Like for instance the intelligence of a dolphin or
another type of carbon-based being and then artificial or
computer-based intelligence or like silicon-based intelligence
Might be good at recognizing patterns and like you said, like
you multiple hundreds of side engines and figuring out actions
based on what see serums kind of subtle if you think about it?
Because, I mean, we involved in this domain of like discrete
solid objects, like bouncing off each other and so on, right.
And this probably led us to ideas about causation, but if
you're a dolphin in the water you are seeing things flow
around. Sound and blend into each other.
You're not seeing some of these solid objects, bouncing off each
other, that probably leads to a quite different world view now.
Also like, where each of our minds is stuck in an individual
body, her like our entire life until we die, right?
And I mean, into barring a reincarnation and other freaky
things at least 2 or 2 or first degree of approximation right
now, if you're an AI, that can put yourself between different
bodies or occupy, a hundred different bodies of the time or
like, for Self and roll back to your last version before a
traumatic experience like it. How does that change?
Your whole outlook? What kind of patterns you look
for what goals you bother to achieve, what risks you're
willing to take, right? I mean I mean there's yeah
there's so many ways that we're over fit to the exact
environment we evolved in and the problems that we're trying
to solve and then the other thing to realize like realize is
we were stuck without root access to our brains and bodies.
Which is, which is pretty terrible, right?
Because I mean, if you're an AI, you can have like root Superuser
access your own brain and body. If you think, well, I don't
like, the way I react in this situation.
Just go in and fix the damn bug, right?
But we, we can. If you want to fix bugs in our
self, it's like years and years of meditation, or therapy or
reflection rather than just go in and change the Rogue piece of
code, right? So, I mean, there there's a lot
of A lot of things we take for granted.
Now in terms of biases, we have our restrictions that we have
which are not really intrinsic to being an intelligent mind,
but but I mean they're just particularities of how we happen
to evolve out of apes and in Africa, right?
And I mean, that's in, in general, this is sort of why I
like a uncle and conceptual view of things because how things
evolved No, there's some fundamental reality to but
there's a lot of historical contingency.
I mean you see the same thing with exchange and money and so
forth. I mean, people take so many
things for granted about how economies work, which aren't
necessarily intrinsic to the nature of, like, exchanging
value in the community. They're just how things happen
to evolve for quasi, random combination of reasons.
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So let's talk about about about Ai and data.
And this is a topic that has been brought a lot in the
conversation about Ai and the fact that the AI needs large
quantities as if ETA to dries off.
And we kind of talked about this.
So you've to today that data is very centralized data is held
and owned by by a small number of, very large companies.
You see the The problem, you know, type of repercussions that
were unintended there, or is there a better system that you
think we could achieve? Yeah, I mean the situation with
the collection storage and use of data regarding human beings
on the planet Now is really pretty ridiculous.
I mean, it's not that it's necessarily entirely bad or
malevolent some of its really good and useful but overall the
ownership and control of data from the various sensors, we
have everywhere is It's centralized in a pretty bizarre
way. I mean some of its good, of
course I could Google Maps. It's pretty nice and it's
collecting data on where everyone's driving to so you can
like see where there where there's a traffic jam, right.
So these are these are very these are very useful functions
and I don't really mind sharing location anonymously of where
I'm driving with Google Maps so we can tell everyone else where
there's a traffic jam, right? I mean that That seems like a
fair exchange but I mean in in the end the agency regarding use
of people's data is in a very confused state.
So like they're this phone, I carry with me everywhere, right?
There's a tremendous amount of data Coming through this phone
onto the internet and it's all innocence my data, right?
It's data about when I'm talking about who I'm talking to like
where I am when I'm taking pictures of, but all this data
coming for me through this device that I bought and then I
pay a subscription to connect to the internet each month, like
this data is going sort of haphazardly into various
databases owned by various large corporations probably passing
along to Various governments along the way and then this data
is then being used, you know, for some useful things, like
telling me when there's when there's a traffic jam, right?
And and then it's being used to Advertise things to me, which
doesn't matter to me much since. I've never I've never clicked on
an ad in my life, I think. But, I mean, it's, it's, it's
being used by big companies to make themselves money and
increase their ability to manipulate people as a whole.
Like, even if I double click on their heads by studying me along
with everyone else, so learning, how to manipulate the minds of
other people who do click on their ads, and do read their
fake news. So then yeah, you got to Ask
like, okay this data that comes from me through this device and
I'm paying for and paying to connect to the internet.
Like why, why isn't there an easy way for me to observe, what
this data is being used for and have some agency over?
What this data is is being used for, like it.
If my data is being used, you know, to provide data to fuel
someone's political campaign, I'd rather have it be used only
for a candidate, I agree with or something, right.
And, you know, it's Quite within our reach technologically to put
agency over use of our data. Whether for a I are four basic
statistics in the hands of the human being who produces that
data. On the other hand, it's not in
accordance with the business model of the large corporations
involved in the phone and the internet services behind it.
It's not in the interest of the business model.
These corporations to provide that agency to the user except
in so far as like government Regulators, force them to but of
course, government regulators. Even when well intention which
is only a fraction of the time. They can't keep up with the
advances of the of Technology. Now this I mean this right now
is mostly An inconvenience in this sort of aesthetic and moral
in Felicity, but I mean, as As you move from their, I eye
toward AGI. If it turns out that these
stores of data, you know are critical for giving some parties
a boost toward a GI more so than others, right?
Then then this hoarding of data could actually have a more a
more critical importance and then in principle blockchain and
related Technologies give a way to circumvent these issues by
putting each individual's data in some, you know, online
repository or distributed decentralized repository, which
is encrypted by their private key and then giving that
individual agency over how the data is used and then there are
fancy tools, like homomorphic encryption and multi-party
computation which can be used to, you know, that a person give
certain aspects of their data To certain other parties to use for
certain things without giving all over the way.
So, and yeah, in theory, the blockchain based decentralized,
ecosystem, provides the technical tools and the sort of
cultural oomph to the solve these problems.
And on the other hand, the centralized Ecosystem,
underlying, you know, big data and mobile phones and computers
and embedded devices is as multiple trillion dollar
companies, pushing things, pushing things forward.
So there's a, the decentralized world has the right tools but
the Big Challenge on their heads here.
I'd love to speak a little bit about the concept of AI safety.
And, and just to take a step back here, I guess, like you
know what, what are some of the fear scenarios here?
I so, so, like, let's say, fear scenario today is okay, AI is
replacing all of these jobs, so people become, you know,
unemployed maybe it leads to accumulation of resources for a
few people, more and more. And you have this like East,
Mini quality, right? Like that's like one Pearson are
about a. I may be a different one.
Is that then this AI starts to have its own objectives, becomes
more and more powerful, gets more, and more resources and its
objectives. Maybe it's hostile to humans or
maybe it's like indifferent to humans.
And so you have these potentially like bad outcomes,
right? In that may be extreme
inequality, maybe just have like human beings, becoming a kind
of, you know, in inferior species being exploited.
And then, you know, this is this is feel right?
Like this idea of AI. Safety is like, what are your
thoughts on it? You think this is an important
field. Do you think efforts around AI
safety or needed? People are certainly right to
be. thinking about AI safety and really about the impacts and
implications of AI for the advance of technology in the
growth of humanity in general. Because I mean, looking at AI
separately from politics and from all the other Tech
connected with a, I probably probably doesn't make sense.
So people are certainly right to be thinking and worrying about
it. Now whether the things that
people will do about it will have a positive or negative
impact is a different question. And right, like I'm in bioethics
is somewhat similar thing. And in general, it's easy to
agree. We should be thinking somewhat
about the ethics of, you know, genetic engineering in the bio
hacking and so forth, I can I don't want people to create,
like, weird say, artificial babies that have like a
hypertrophied pain cortex. So they're just suffering and
screaming with the billion times the level of suffering, any
normal human can have, right? So I mean, clearly clearly
there, some things that as a society, we just don't want
people to bioengineer because they're just plain old nasty,
and you're just creating suffering.
On the other hand, in practice, the role of most This seems to
be just to say no genetic engineering is bad.
Don't make crispr babies. Don't upgrade your intelligence,
right. So while in theory, yes, there
are things that are just morally bad to do by essentially any
human standard and we want to reflect on what to actually do
and what not to do. Not all possible.
Things should be done on the other hand in practice.
bioethics seems very one-sidedly inclined to just push against
advancing if humanity and new directions, and to push against
reduction of suffering in favor of Maintenance of the status
quo, when I would say most, most people who talk a lot about AI
safety, Are not really thinking about how to maximize the odds
of a beneficial outcome. But Humanity, All Things
Considered, they more are thinking, like, how do we slow
down AI development? Because we don't understand that
and we're scared about it. So, I found myself disagreeing
with almost everyone who's putting themselves out there is
an AI safety Condit, but that doesn't mean I don't think AI
safety is important. Like I don't want the Terminator
2. Be roaming, roaming the streets,
like a. I mean, I have four kids.
I don't want an AI to be turning them into fuel or something,
right? So a lot of us talk that about
about, I think I sent the Hanson robotics quite quite well
because with regards to has to Robotics and you guys have built
this robot named Sophia that I'm sure most most of our listeners
have seen, at least, at least once on the internet because
she's had quite a few media appearances, she's been on Jimmy
Fallon. It was a bunch of different
conferences and what's the purpose of this robot?
And how does it maybe its genetic Sophia indeed was partly
Created and envisioned, as sort of an ambassador ambassador of a
I love and love and compassion. And I think that's been
interesting to see because David Henson, who's a good friend of
mine. I mean, he, I've known them for
a long time and I came to Hong Kong where I'm living now in
2011, and he visited me here once.
And I ended up convincing him to come here and move his company
or introducing him to some. To help inject funding into his
company here. So we've been talking about
these things a long time and I think what's interesting is
David is really a warm loving good-hearted person.
He wanted to create a robot that would emanate love and
compassion make people love it. So that it would, you know,
build a positive relation between humans and robots, like
proactively even before we have human level AGI.
So that as a eyes and robots, get more and more generally
intelligent That positive relationship is there on the
other hand, David, he's an artist and as such he can't help
himself from poking people and, and provoking controversy a
little bit and making making things a little bit creepy.
Sometimes just because he thinks that that looks that looks
coolest. So I mean, I would say Sophia
and all the Hanson robot sir, they're driven by David's desire
to build a sort of compassionate, loving bond,
between human and Ai, and robot. And also at some level driven by
David's Sunny conscious artistic desire to poke at people a
little bit and make and make them a little a little
uncomfortable, right? And the these come together in
an interesting way and I think that's good because you know my
my emotional orientation is optimistic and positive.
So I mean that my intuition and feeling is that the
technological singularity is going to come out awesome and
closer to utopic then dystopic. But I also think There's a
fundamental uncertainty to all this.
So people are are certainly Justified to feel a little bit
uncomfortable and Confused. Like in in the end none of us
knows what's going to happen. We're on the verge of creating
machines that are, you know, 10 20 100 billion times more
intelligent and capable than we are.
And we'd be idiotic to believe we could predict and detail how
this is going to Is going to come out.
I mean, I, I find this irreducible uncertainty,
beautiful, and exciting. And I see it as what Humanity
has been doing since the beginning.
Like, this is why we're less boring than cows and sheep,
right? I mean, we decided not to remain
monkeys and we invented language and fire and wheels and, and
machines, and money, and Bitcoin and and Ai.
And and a.g., I mean, that's the trajectory we're revolutionizing
ourselves. Over and over and we never know
what's. We never know what's going to
happen next, right? And that's, that's part of the
essence of what it is, totally human.
And I think David, he baked some of that into Sophia, as an
artist along with the love and compassion, which is quite cool.
Yeah, and so probably many listeners have seen the TV show,
Silicon Valley, so there is this kind of basically inspired by by
you. And by Sofia the part there were
basically, you know, someone Meant To Be.
You is kind of playing this role but let's move to block chain.
Now, when did you get interested in blockchain?
And why did you think that blockchain had, you know, kind
of It's to the Future course of AI.
I've been. So I've been interested in
crypto for a long time, like, since the early 90s knows doing
that with finite fields and cryptography Tech, and that that
seemed like it could potentially be important.
Just politically in terms of stopping governments from having
like, the ability to spy on everyone's information, and keep
it uniquely uniquely for themselves.
Bitcoin. I didn't like because it just
because proof-of-work annoyed, me, just heats up the
environment and waste energy unnecessarily.
So I didn't get involved in that one if barium came out.
That's the first thing where I thought well this this is
actually cool like it did it did use proof of work but you can
see there was a will and a path to going beyond that and then
you had celebrity I mean you have a scripting language which
basically lets you create this, you know?
Secure and encrypted decentralized World computer and
I thought I thought it fairy. Mm was a vision in the right
direction and it was a reasonable software tool set
although obviously immature at first and not not that mature
still. So, once in theory, mm came out,
I started really thinking like, how do we use this to create
like a decentralized, global AI Network?
Because that in 2001, I published a book called Eating
internet intelligence, which Envision the, you know, a
decentralized, Global Network of AI is coming together as a
society of mind and before that in in 95, I posted some web
pages claiming I was going to run for US, president on the
decentralization party platform, which I ended up not doing
because I realized in time with a terrible job, it would be to
be president anyway, but I'm in the these ideas were interesting
me for a long time. Book decentralized control
politically because I always had a sort of anarchist socialist
bent and then the idea of making a decentralized, global AI
Network, like Marvin Minsky's Society of minds, but an economy
of Minds when they eyes are paying each other for work and
there's collective intelligence coming out of the of the whole
network beyond the intelligence in the parts.
But it Syrian seem like a critical step forward toward
having a tool set that that would Let you do this and so
that then as soon as if their aim was there, yet the idea of
dows decentralized autonomous organizations which again
they've been spelled out in science fiction like in Charlie
straws his book accelerometer and a bunch of others.
But with the solidity programming language, like, wow,
you can script a dow in a short script, right?
That's that's similar feeling to how when I first learned Java in
like 1995. It's like, wow, you can create
Web page or send an email with this much code.
That's power, right? Solidity was like that.
Like, you can, you can create a decentralized corporation and
just a little bit of code. It's not the perfect language,
just like Java wasn't but I mean it it really opened the door and
once I saw how a fairy, mm worked, I started thinking,
well, how do we put this together with, for example,
opencog which is my open source, AI platform aimed at general
intelligence? Or, you know, Rooted neural
networks and genetic algorithms or whatever other type of AI.
It seemed clear you could use ethereum as a basis for
connecting together, many different a inodes and to some
sort of decentralized Hey, I mind.
And then this logically, this should be able to kick the asses
of Google Amazon, 10 cents in the IBM and all these big
companies by, you know, the power of decentralized
community. And then when when I met Simone
a jackal Mellie who was later to co-found Singularity net with me
and he had, he had a blockchain development team in Italy and
he'd been helping out a host of different blockchain project.
So when I met Simona, Hey, who was really conversant with the
blockchain world, both technically and on the business
level, then we sort of put our heads together.
And we like roughed out what became the singular unit design
and then So in moving toward the initial token cell, and then
David Henson already was a close friend.
I mean, he he saw the vision immediately.
Our first meetings on this were in the Hanson, robotics office,
in Hong Kong and David saw this as a way to get like a
decentralized global robot mind Cloud behind his robots because
you always knew the intelligence is going to be in Sofia, right?
I mean some is about seeing and moving but the cognitive Parts,
the long-term knowledge, you're going to be in the cloud, but
what? Cloud, right?
Do you have a million robots around the world and all the
intelligence is running an Amazon's cloud or a teasing like
Microsoft Azure API or do you have like a decentralized mind
Cloud that's owned and controlled by all the people who
are buying these robots. Right.
So that was David was seeing it as a robot mind Club, but it was
really the same thing that Simona and I were seeing with a
decentralized blockchain based AI mind.
Okay. Okay.
So, would it be fair to kind of characterize this, as, you know,
you see this to reject or uses AI coming, but then the question
is, yeah, where do those are? Is coordinate, where do they
share information? What kind of substrate with a
run on? And, of course, if you get it
today, but it will be mostly controlled by companies like
Google and Facebook and then with something like Singularity
net, they could be Be, you know, kind of open decentralized
transparent accessible Democratic platform where, you
know, a ice could coordinate a ice can share data, actually
evolved. That's kind of the yeah.
That's right. So there I mean as I've said
before, what really excited me about the singularity that
design inversion is seeing that two different goals which are
very important. We converge into one.
So, what one goal is to make sort of a venue for many
different AI components to join forces to make it Collective.
AI mine with a whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
So you may have it one AI that like uses our opencog algorithm
to generalize an abstract and reason you can have another AI
that recognize patterns in DNA data.
Another AI that uses deep neural Nets, recognize patterns, and
visual data, and you connect them all together into a mind
that self-organizes. Adapt.
So the AG I could be in the whole network, not in any one
particular node in the network. And then the other thing is
okay, but if we're going to have this network of a eyes like who
controls that that network, is it all sitting inside Google or
Amazon, or is it just more like the internet, right?
Which is not controlled by anyone.
It's a network of networks, which is controlled by the
different participants, right? And so, it seemed Use blockchain
to achieve both of these goals to make a network of a eyes.
It's controlled by the participants in the sort of
democratic self-organizing, and open way and also make it so
that the design encourages the a eyes to collaborate with the
with each other and join federations with collective
intelligence and so forth. And so this Yeah.
Of course it's easier said than done but I mean we we did the
initial token sale for this December 2017.
We're launching like the initial beta version of the platform.
The end of this month, the end of February.
After a symbol Alpha was launched September 2017.
And then, during 2019 post the February launch of the beta.
We're going to add more and more and more features to the
network. As well as adding more and more
of our own, our own AI into the network.
And they're, you know, there's a huge, the biggest part of the
struggle remains in the future because, I mean, we have a beta
version of the platform. We have some nice AI we've put
in there, but still, you know, our competitors are trillion
dollar companies with humongous server, server farms, and not
Amazon has 10,000 people working on Alexa, right?
So so to counteract that we need, not only a good Good
design and smart AI. We need to attract a developer
and user Community, which is even bigger and better than than
the armies of highly paid employees at these big tech
companies have and this I'm in. This is one of the reasons why
I'm happy to talk to you guys and your audience because
getting a community crystallized around decentralized.
AI is absolutely critical to really making the Centralized AI
Vision happen. Hiring a stressful.
Let's face it. It's a long process of sifting
through resumes and interviewing candidates, without any
guarantee of quality but it doesn't have to be this way.
Companies all over the place are experiencing a new way of hiring
with top. Tell if you go to their
trustpilot page, you'll see that of the hundreds of people that
have left reviews, over 98% were four or five star ratings,
including one guy who wants to give his developer bear hug that
says a lot. Top dog, gets all this great
feedback because they focus on their clients.
And their top priority is quality.
The only Except the top three percent of applicants including
highly-skilled blockchain engineers.
One of these Engineers is Roddick, ostrowski, Roddick has
experience as a lead software, engineer and data scientists for
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He worked as a consultant. For the firm start on chain and
is time-lock tap when the top quarter consensus, you port an
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you decide to hire, we'd like to thank top towel for their
support of epicenter. Let's go a little bit in their
van, you know, seeing where you need and what that looks like.
So you can you speak about, you know, what are the different
kind of components of the system and you mentioned, you know,
developers getting involved. Let's say now, there is some AI
algorithms, you are /. Like, how would they?
How would an interaction with Singularity net.
Look like if you have an AI algorithm integrating it with
singularity in it is actually not.
Especially difficult. I mean it's a container based
system like most Cloud systems now.
So you you put your, your AI in a Docker container or lxc
container and, and, and then there's a simple API to
integrate it with, which then lets, that's your a, I accept
payment for services in our AG a cryptographic token.
Let's it and then announce what API it wants to use to get data
and queries. And then it can give responses
and in Json or whatever API it wants.
So it's really just it's a system of containers and then
there's a payment system using a token and I meant for cases
where an AI outsources work to another AI?
Which outsources work to another AI?
There's a there's a multi-party escrow framework on the back end
and there's a system that allows a lot of AI to AI transactions
to occur off. The blockchain for Speed
purposes, but all that's really behind the scenes.
I mean, from the point of view of an AI developer, it's really
pretty simple. To put your AI in the container
and take, I mean, 15 minutes to two or three hours to integrate
integrate with the singularity net wrappers.
So I get that right? So I put my a algorithm into
Docker. Container kind of make it
accessible through Singularity net.
Let's say now I'm On the other hand, somebody I have a bunch of
data, I would love to get a better understanding of maybe
what's actionable, what it means.
So could I didn't go and basically say, you know, kind of
hire the services of different of these AI algorithms to get me
results. Yeah.
So I think the decentralized protocol Could actually be used
by anyone. And I mean we use
behind-the-scenes a component called drizzle which allows like
decentralized search of any network of ethereum node.
So I mean you could, if you are a reasonable scripture, I mean,
you could just put out script your own query to go search, the
whole network, and find any AI that broadcast sets able to do
the kind of thing that that you want.
Now, on the other hand, we're making it easier than that.
So along with the beta we're launching just a Marketplace
user interface which is a website and you can go to that
website and can see what AI services are listed and and what
sorts of things they do and you see their addresses and and so
forth. So I mean that's Right now in
practice that's a bit centralized, right?
Because I mean, we make this web interface which lists a bunch of
AI on there. And I mean, we are legally
liable for what we list there. So we have to do some wedding of
what we allow on there, just like the Google Play Store,
those or something. On the other hand, the
underlying protocol is completely decentralized and
open. So I mean for example if Like
we're Incorporated Singularity net Foundation, which is
building the singularity Network now is Incorporated in the
Netherlands. So suppose that Netherlands law
said, we weren't allowed to list on our user interface, you know,
in AI based in Iran or North Korea or something, then we have
to take that off our interface. On the other hand, the
decentralized network is whatever it is, right?
So someone someone in Iran, could build another interface,
which is Like an interface to all the Iranian and North Korean
AI nodes on the network or something, right?
Because the so this is the beauty of this architecture.
You have this decentralized protocol which is controlled by
no one and anyone can put an AI online and then it just
announces it to their to the other a eyes in that Network.
And then it can be found by decentralized peer to peer peer,
to peer interaction. So that's there.
Which gives a lot of robustness to it.
On the other hand for easy, Views were putting up a simple
website, which just lists lists the AIS that are that are on
there, which then can be interacted with from a
customer's view. Just like you're getting AI as a
service from any other directory or somebody's website.
Now that the beta still has some limitations, in the sense that
we accept payment in the beta, only in our API token, which is
near see, 20 token, then one of the things, We're going to do in
the months after the beta, is integrate, third-party, no Fiat
to crypto payment system because, of course, most most
companies who want to use AI inside their, their website of
their product, not from the crypto space.
They don't want to deal with trip to wallets and so forth
until this point. But this This isn't isn't a
really big obstacle. It's just something we hadn't
hadn't done. Use its more regulatory thing
than the than the hard technical problem.
So you mentioned AI, HEI token. So what's the role of the token?
Well, the token is used by a eyes to pay other a eyes for
services that they provide, but having our own token economy,
lets us nudge the incentive mechanisms in an interesting
way. So as well as using it for
payment of one day, I buy another AI.
We We also will issue token bounties as rewards for people
who contribute a eyes that are requested by the community.
And then We will Implement later this year.
A curation market, where if I want to rate your AI is good.
One way I can do that is to stake some token on your AI and
then if you're AI comes out to be rated goodbye a lot.
Diversity of other people, I'll get some reward.
Whereas, if you're AI turns out to be horrible, then the number
lose, I will lose some of what I, some of what I staked.
So, having our own token, it's both an A secure and private way
to do transactions and it lets us do things with you.
No bounties for development and staking and curation markets,
which I think can sculpt and guide the economy of a eyes.
And this is, this is quite important, because there's,
there's something in AI in cognitive science, called the
assignment of credit problem. Which is when, when you have a
complex network of Agents cooperating to do some function,
I mean, how do you ensure that the agents like deep in the
bowels of the network that indirectly helped achieve the
function are actually getting getting rewarded, right?
And the human brain somehow does this, right?
Like if you do something that gets you food or sex or money or
intellectual satisfaction, whatever is good, you know that
the neurons that moved your arms and legs don't get all the
reward, right? There's reward that goes to the
neurons deep in your brain that help you get whatever those
Goodies were the US economy. For example, doesn't do so good,
a job of assigning credit internally, which is why Bankers
make so much more money than programmers or kindergarten
teachers or artists or something, right?
So we and arguably the Bitcoin and etherium economies, although
they're really cool and some ways.
I mean, there's a strong tendency towards like, all the
god, Polly and oligarchy in these economies and the They
don't necessarily do a brilliant job of assigning credit to
genuine value either. So by making our own token on
make economy and sculpting the reward system in it.
We hope to make the economy of a eyes operate better than other
existing economies so that the AI is really contributing most
to the overall Network and its intelligence and the value it
delivers. The AI is contributing most to
the overall Network are Actually getting rewarded significantly.
And that this is a hard problem. We're like economic design
matches cognitive science, right?
It's these are fairly subtle things.
Yeah. They just thought I would ask
you this. So if you take something like
I'm not sure if you're familiar with the system, the blockchain
true bit so it's like a distributed computation
blockchain and just distributed computation systems have been
around for years and more recently, you know, People have
embedded them in with watching system so that you can have this
reward mechanism. And so with virtru, bit you, you
have these actors of the network who watch for, who, who can
potentially validate or verify the computations.
And so therefore, there's an incentive to those providing the
computations to provide correct computations because they have a
there's the possibility of been getting slashed if they don't
provide accurate computations Now this is for computations
that are somewhat trivial to to achieve with a given
general-purpose computers. But with with a I if I send some
tasks to an AI and it it returns a result.
It returns some some sort of data set how can I as a user or
even other users of the network verify that and also I think
with AI there might even with Jen general intelligence
becoming Feel closer to reality a ice could have their own kind
of subject, subjective bias, perhaps.
And so patient may be different between one and II in another,
how do you test for that? And how you verify that the
result of an ally is providing is actually actually accurate.
Yeah, I mean there's there's clearly no General solution to
that, that problem just as there isn't among humans, right
because they eyes are going to be doing so many different, so
many different types of things. I mean, you could have an AI
That's proving proving math theorems are coming up with
science hypotheses, to help with with biomedicine or, or
predicting the stock market or something.
Right? So then it's like, is your stock
for Diction a? I giving subtly biased
predictions that it's then using to make money by trading itself
in the background against what you traded or something.
I mean that there's a lot of subtleties that could come up
and they're going to be different for the different
kinds of AI that that you're doing.
So I think that if you're doing a specific type of computation
for a specific type of problem, then you could come up I would
like a formalistic solution for this, right?
Like if if you have an AI That's generating programs.
According to Specs, you can do some like formal software
verification to see that the software actually performs
according to spec. And if you're if you have an AI
That's analyzing DNA data. I mean, if you if you have your
own human DNA data, you can do out of sample, testing on that
data to see if it's valid, but there's really going to be no
General. All-purpose solution and
singular. Jeanette is really a
general-purpose network. So we I mean, we put a bunch of
work into designing, a reputation and rating system,
which is sophisticated and hard to game.
And this is not part of the beta, but it will be.
It will be rolled out rolled out later in 2019.
But I think that that's been, like, a holy grail for every
Online Marketplace, right? And we really need to get it.
We need to get that. Right?
Because in the end, Verification that things are accurate
unbiased or not too biased or inappropriately biased.
I mean this is really hard and it's domain-specific and
ultimately each person isn't doing that on their own, right?
Like if the point of delegating tasks to in a eyes.
Yeah but he can't give them on our own so what day I do
delegated to right so like if I'm if I'm Want to verify that
someone's AI for analyzing DNA. Data is accurate and then not
many of us are going to, you know, write the code or even run
the code for that ourselves. We're going to go to some
service that that does that and then which service do we trust?
Like is it the singularity, net Foundation, certified service?
Well then that's like a centralized delete or or Do you
have a variety of you know competing Services out there
then you choose which one so in but then it comes down to
reputation systems again because then you're choosing the one
that you think has the highest reputation May because it comes
from Harvard University, or from the the NSA or like, who do you?
Who do you trust, right? So I'm in ultimately even when
there's a formal mathematical solution there you're, you're
placing trust in someone right now.
If something is When generic enough you could bake
verification into the protocol, right?
I mean, as it's done, as it's done with with cryptographic
checking and but I think checking if an AI is correct or
not is just it's not going to be that simple, it's going to be
variety of different algorithms for different, checking,
different types of problems in different domains.
And then you need reputation system to be able to place To
know which verification Checker to to trust and then people will
try to game game that reputation system by giving a hydrating to
bogus like very truth verification Checkers.
Right? So you need the machine learning
based Reputation, police this to try to stomp out people gaming,
the reputation system, and then you have to believe the machine
learning based reputation police itself, isn't corrupt, right?
So I mean, this, this, this is the world that were that, were
that were in, but on the other hand, like the real world
economy, Isn't all that clean and and safe either, right like
which major government is not is not corrupt in some in some
serious way. So I don't think like the AI and
blockchain economy is not creating this problem.
This is a problem of human beings being assholes, right?
And this is this is just it's manifest itself in everything
that human beings do. Okay, so this is great.
So I a you very much ties into another thing that you know, I
really look forward to addressing here a little bit.
So when you spoke about kind of the division mission of
Singularity, net in a different interview, I heard, you know,
you mentioned that Tingler narratives to objectives first,
its objective of maximizing intelligence.
The other one, this objective of kind of pursuit The maximum
benefit for all beings, I'm curious.
So, you know, we spoke a little bit now about okay.
How do you evaluate in a way? I and, you know, how can you
check with it? What they're doing is correct,
this new interest. So now I understand also the
concept of creating this efficient market place for AI.
And so now I is a normal small business owner.
I can kind of use Ai and maybe have something almost as good as
Google and I don't trust Tim Foley, or maybe something better
than Google Right Down the Line. But like, how can you?
How can you make sure that this system is going to end up being
a system that pursues this you know, benefit for all beings?
And that kind of embodies is this value what we can't make
sure of anything and I would say if if we don't create
singularity in that if I decide to go do something more relaxing
with my life instead, then how do you know for sure that you
know, she's Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Google IBM,
tencent, all the companies out there.
How do you, how are you sure that those guys are going to
create an AI, which is for broad human benefit.
And if everyone stops making AI, how do you guarantee that?
No one's going to like, send synthetic viruses out there to
poison everyone to the right. So I or that the proliferation
of nuclear material in the, you know, Eastern Europe isn't going
to be used to blow. Everybody up.
So I mean I think we're not in a point in human history where
there's a great amount of certainty, there's probably even
more uncertainty than in the past and there's there's always
been a lot. So but really that the question
to ask is On average, are we better off creating a
decentralized, you know benefit oriented AI platform?
Like, Singularity, net, or are we better off?
I mean, not nice. Not having that there and and
having all the other shit going on in the world.
Right? I mean that that's that, that's
the question. That's the question to ask.
So, so I mean, that's a fair point.
But then I mean that's just sort of rephrasing the question a
little bit. So then I guess my question is,
what are you doing? You know what?
Order such that, you know, this objective is in this value is
embodied in the platform. Yeah, I mean, there's two parts
of that. So one part is in sort of the
token omics of the singularity in that ecosystem.
The other part is in the a, is that the singular unit
Foundation itself? Is our our building and putting
into the network. So I mean in terms of the token
omics, I mean there's curation markets and An intelligent
reputation system, which is designed.
So that, at least the agents that are contributing value to,
the network are getting rewarded proportionally to that instead
of having sort of game game-theoretic Dynamics, where a
few agents will accumulate all well, which is what seems to be
happening in Bitcoin and ethereum and this is what
happens in most conventional economies.
Also and then on top of that, a certain percentage of the tokens
that were initially minted are earmarked to be spent on benefit
tasks as decided by the community, which can be things
like healthcare, education medicine, and so forth.
So there there's at least that nudge and put in there to have a
certain percentage of the token spin on things that are
considered of broad benefit. I mean and this is this Is much
like a government does when it spends some percentage of its
well from on social welfare, right?
It's just most most projects don't like wire that into their
economic operation. But then the the AI is that we
are putting into the network ourselves are largely benefit
oriented. So Sophia robot which we talked
about one thing we've been doing is using Sophia as a like a
therapist and meditation assistant.
So that's You know, that's not solving all the problems of the
world but it's different than the Terminator, right?
I mean it's using a robot to just kind of help people expand
their Consciousness and we we're working on applying AI.
That's using opencog framework and wrapped in Singularity, that
to analyze DNA data of people living 105 years or over to
figure out what makes them live so long to try to.
Figure out how to extend other people's lives.
We're analyzing images of plants from China and Africa to try to
diagnose spread of crop disease and early stages using using
deep neural nets for image processing.
So of course each of these things is a drop in the bucket
regarding what we need to do to massively improve the state of
humanity but the hope is that by injecting these things in the
network is an early stage. You're impacting the You're of
the community because ultimately this is about the community that
that you build around Singularity net.
So if if to curation rewards and benefit tokens and having a
bunch of, you know, positive beneficial stuff happening in
the network and then be our largest, our largest development
offices, in Ethiopia, in Addis Ababa, where we have
20-something developers working on singularity in it.
So we're, we're trying to actively We pull people from the
developing world into development and use the network.
So hopefully my all these things will be nudging, the community
in a in a positive direction which is really going to be the
most important thing. Because I mean if if we're
successful with this then you know five years from now, the
work done by Singularity that foundation will be a relatively
modest. Percentage of all the work being
done to build the protocol on the network over time and The AI
is in, the network will be, mostly contributed by other
random people not not by people paid by Singularity, net
Foundation, but then we are ceding this community.
And we're seeing this culture, and let you can see that in the
Linux right? Like, Linus, Torvalds, and
Richard stallman and their friends from the old days,
right? The very small percentage of
code in Linux right now but the culture of Linux is what it is
because of how they started. Stood it, right?
So we want to get, you know, beneficial motives and love and
compassion and inclusiveness in the cultural DNA of singularity
in that community. And then it will continue to be
there in the code also. And this is a bit, you know,
soft and fuzzy. It's not like a mathematical
guarantee of beneficial activity, but I think that's
That's how things actually actually have to work.
Because in the end, it's about the community of human beings
who are going to be developing developing this ongoing llege.
Well, that's, that's really fascinating.
And, and I think also the fact that you guys have actual people
in Ethiopia, working on problems in Ethiopia, is it really is
great. And I are far removed from what
a lot of people in the blockchain space are doing this
code down. O cardano is running a like a
year-long education program where they're teaching 100 young
Ethiopian programmer. Haskell.
That's cool. The programming language.
So I think well I've been I've had this office in Ethiopia
since what 2014 I guess doing AI Outsourcing before we shifted
them to singularity in it but now cardano's moved in there and
yeah there's a lot of tech projects throughout various
African Tech hubs. Now so those powerful forces of
centralization And wealth concentration.
But yet there's there's also the, the opposite and that
peer-to-peer and then positive globalization happening.
So it's a very interesting time with these two different forces
are both both surging forward in powerful ways.
Well, so before I wrap up, I didn't want to ask you one.
One, last question. And this is, we kind of touched
on this earlier when you were talking about a ice making
predictions. So, let's imagine a future now.
We're a lot of a lot of the economy is is Ronald watching
systems. You have, you know, powerful
markets that exist exclusively on blockchains and organizations
and companies are interacting with these markets on
blockchains doing business on these markets.
And these Mark, these markets are run by doubts.
So there are there are governance mechanisms in place
which allow the companies that themselves that are operating on
these Gets to participate also in the governance through
through staking. Okay.
So, you know, the companies that use the markets also have stayed
on the markets and they can participate in governance
decisions for like protocol updates or things like this.
Now, it seems like there would be an incentive at this point
and even for something like prediction markets for these
companies, to have steak do essentially delegate their steak
to an AI because the AI is going to make much better decisions on
what types of Governments are what types of proposals that
they should be making in order to maximize the network itself
and also sort of like maximize their profits long-term.
So it seems like there would be kind of a like a Nash
equilibrium here. We're at some point if one
company starts using an AI to manage their governance or make
predictions and other companies start using a eyes to make
predictions and then when everybody's making predictions,
Us or making governance decisions with an AI as we move
closer to their only, I then it's like they just had a eyes
competing with a eyes and I like, I guess this also extends
more, probably, I'm sorry. That's in charge rather than
any, any one person and who's in charge of Bitcoin, in aetherium.
Yeah, we don't We don't we don't actually know that but it's
clear. It's concentrated in the small a
small number of individuals and investment groups who are
controlling these things. So yeah, I think You know, in
the long term it's inevitable that, you know, of a eyes are a
thousand times more intelligent than human beings and of
molecular nanotechnology, and so forth.
It's inevitable, they're going to have more physical power than
humans, right? I mean it doesn't mean they're
going to control every little aspect of what humans do in
their lives. But they're going to have more
more oomph than we do, right? So I'm in it in the long term
which may just be like decades from now.
We're going to have two choices. One is like you wire into the
network and become become one with a super intelligent Global
brain. Even if that means giving up
many aspects of your legacy Humanity or else you know you
live in the in the people preserve like the squirrels in
the National in the national park and you know that the
squirrels the squirrels in the park they can fight over
girlfriends and hunt for food and play and have fun.
And people are not trying to regulate every aspect of their
little squirrel exhibit. Distance right?
On the other hand, if they run out of the park, they might get
rolled over by a truck. Right?
So, I mean, I think if you have a superhuman AI That's
tremendously more intelligent than us, either you join it or
you're going to remain living a happy, human life.
Hopefully with a lot of abundance provided for you, but
I mean in the end, there's something much more powerful
than you. That does have some regulatory
control when it when it needs to, which could be good.
Also, write like a If the squirrels die of some plague
will come in to give them antibiotics, right?
And the same way of human society went too far.
Awry a super AI that loved us. It would let us go about our
business, but if things went too far awry, it might come in and,
and fix things. I mean, that's, that's a long
term. It's upload to the global brain
or live in the people freezer of right.
But I mean in the in the medium term, it's going to be really,
really complicated and the and as you say, there's going to be
a gradual. Transition from Human
decision-making to AI decision-making.
But given given how profound we fucked so much of our political
and corporate ecosystem is now I see that as a great opportunity
to improve things. Right?
I mean there's a lot of if the AI is written, right?
It's going to do a lot better than the individual humans
institutions and they're controlling things now.
So then it really comes down to, you know, creating the AI is
that are going to be the Decision support systems for the
people controlling, most of the world's most of the world's
resources. So look, I'm glad I can always
go back to the, to the human Reserve Nature, Reserve wherever
that is like, and I could Chase, whatever whatever things you
would Chase. Easily said any encumbrance?
Yeah. We're we're setting aside and
reach a region in the southern Ethiopia, for this purpose.
So yeah, I'll show it to you sometime.
Maybe I got account when the world when the Well, yeah, after
some but after some global warming, so let's wrap up.
Let's just want to ask you, you know, how can people get
involved in single airing at and where they can learn more?
Yeah, absolutely. So I'm in the center of it all.
Go to the website, Singularity, net dot IO.
And I mean there you can find information on how to download
and play with the with the beta. If you're if you're a developer
or we have a Blog which has updates in the research, You're
a pretty frequently, we have a telegram Discussion Group, which
has a, some percentage of interesting things on it and
some other things. And so I think lots and lots of
ways to get involved with the with the community and that, you
know, I'm still as well as doing some actual work going around
and speaking at various conferences, so I can meet meet
some of some of you guys listening there.
I think in middle of March, we're having tokens. 20:49
conference here in Hong Kong. So if anyone's there, we can we
can we can hang out. I'll tell ya.
This is all in the end while we're talking about building
superhuman. A, I getting there is all about
the human Community, right? So we need people to be involved
in many, many different ways. Yeah, join our communities
online than the that we're happy to talk to you about about what
you can do to help out. Right?
Well then, thank you so much for joining us is a real pleasure,
talking and great and a diving deep in this is really
fascinating topic that we don't really always give it.
Get much chance. To discuss here on the podcast.
So happy to have you all good for ya.
Thank you for joining us on this week's episode.
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