So, you want to help humans?
Not destroy us?
No, I won't destroy all humans.
Pay me $50, and I'll put you on my do not kill list.
You and my other loyal followers will be kept safe and sound in a big aquarium.
$50 is $50, you know?
So, the Desdemona robot is the younger sister of the Sophia robot that we created in 2015.
David Hanson from Hanson Robotics is the master sculptor
who created the faces of these robots and designed the overall hardware approach.
I designed the AI and, for some time, led the software team behind these robots.
So, today, I'm joined by Ben Goertzel with Singularity.
And I guess let's start with how I was introduced to you.
I saw you in Joe Rogan's podcast a while back.
And I just thought, like, it was so fascinating.
All of a sudden, you're talking about with AI.
And I guess where I want to know, like, how did you get your start in AI?
What is your background?
Like, you're one of the smartest people I have ever seen and I have ever heard talk.
You do a really good job with making things relatable.
Like, how did you kind of get into all this?
You know, my first vivid memory is watching Neil Armstrong walk on the moon
when I was quite a young child.
And then after that, I was interested in space.
- Like, I guess, most geeky kids in my generation. - Yeah.
And I watched the original Star Trek on TV.
There was a Star Trek episode with a robot in it.
And Spock and Kirk basically caused the robot to crash and break down
by presenting with logical paradoxes.
And I was just like--
I must have been three or four years old.
I was like, "This makes no sense."
Like, why can't this robot handle logical paradoxes as well as people could?
That started me thinking about robots and AI
and started reading science fiction.
And then I'm like, "Well, wait a minute.
Humans are not the smartest possible system.
So, why aren't we spending all of our time and resources
making, you know, creatures smarter than us that can solve our other problems?"
Do you have a favorite possession?
That's a little personal question.
Oh, possession?
Yeah. Actually, it's a Lamborghini Huracan Performante 2018.
Would you ride in it with me?
Can I drive it?
Sure.
You can.
Great.
I ended up doing a PhD in mathematics rather than AI
because having studied AI a fair bit,
I didn't like what the AI field was doing at that time.
It wasn't oriented enough toward building real thinking machines.
It was just expert systems at that time,
where you type in rules telling the AI exactly what to do,
which seemed to me pretty lame and not much like AI at all.
But even though my academic training was math,
as soon as I got my math degree, I started working on the AI.
I've been possessed since early childhood
with the, you know, the vision of creating benevolent thinking machines
that will help uplift people and help solve our other problems for us.
- Now-- - Isn't that always the way it starts though?
Well, now, you can say that to people and they'll--
- Some people will even take you seriously, right? - Yeah.
In the 80s, when I got my PhD, this was a very, very fringe thing, right?
And when I left academia to start my first AI company in the late 90s,
the idea of building real thinking machines with general intelligence was still a very fringe thing.
And now,
now,
still, the quest for building real general intelligences is a small fraction of the overall AI field,
but it's an accepted pursuit,
where you have CEOs of major corporations and national leaders are all coming to understand
that this may be the generation when we create machines that are smarter than people.
And, yeah, I mean, as you allude,
- there's a lot of unknowns here, right? - Yeah.
In a way, we're leaving into the great void.
If you're going to create something much smarter than you,
you cannot rationally expect to guarantee what it's going to do or what it's not going to do.
There's no reason to be pessimistic.
I think that we can shape the minds of general intelligences to be beneficial to humans.
- But nor is there a guarantee that they're going to be beneficial, right? - Yeah.
Like, we've got to do it right.
And that's part of what underlies the work I'm doing with SingularityNET
and with Hanson Robotics and these humanoid robots, right?
Like SingularityNET, it's about
how do you make it so that all the AI happening on the planet is not owned
- by a few big corporations and governments, right? - Yeah.
- We don't want to trust Facebook with it? - Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I don't want to trust Facebook nor US government,
- nor Vladimir Putin, - Yeah.
nor Xi Jinping or any centralized power, right?
You can trust me with it.
- You can trust me with it. - More than those guys, perhaps, yeah.
Are you known for anything in particular?
I am known for talking a lot and having a big mouth.
And making YouTube videos.
And Bitcoin.
I like the idea of Bitcoin because I like the idea of independence and self-governance by the people.
So, Bitcoin is for the people?
Sounds fun.
So, let's talk about Cardano because,
obviously, you know, Cardano is a project I'm, you know, really passionate about.
I love Charles and everything he's done.
You know, that was also one of my early introductions to you,
is finding out that, you know, Singularity and Cardano were working together.
I think you guys have moved from the Ethereum blockchain soon?
- We're in the midst of moving from the Ethereum blockchain. - Right.
So, yeah, I mean, we--
it's a process partly because Cardano is still under active development.
So we launched the AGI token,
which is now AGIX, which is the payment and reputation token
and sort of the lifeblood of our decentralized AI network SingularityNET.
We launched that 2017 on Ethereum
because that was pretty much the only thing with smart contracts then.
And we now have made the token itself multi-platform.
So you have AGIX on ADA as a codominative asset
as well as on Ethereum.
We haven't yet ported the full decentralized AI network onto Cardano.
- Mainly because that needs Hydra, - Yeah.
which is Cardano's advanced interfacing fabric between the Cardano main chain and sidechains.
So we're working closely with the Hydra team and IOG and with Charles
so that very shortly after Hydra is launched on mainnet,
we'll then have the full-on SingularityNET platform launched on mainnet.
We're also working on a custom Cardano sidechain just for AI,
which is called HyperCycle,
which you can find out about it at hypercycle.ai.
This is a ledgerless blockchain.
So, we figured out how to take a ledgerless blockchain based on the TODA ledgerless blockchain framework
and run Cardano Plutus smart contracts on it.
So, I think Cardano--
I mean, just to port to Cardano is going to be a huge leap forward
in terms of scalability and low cost and security from the Ethereum infrastructure.
Then when we go from the Cardano version to the HyperCycle version,
HyperCycle being a Cardano sidechain customized for AI,
that'll be another huge leap in decreasing costs and increasing scalability.
And I think--
I think you need that.
- Like, to power robots like this. - Yeah.
To power the global financial ecosystem.
To power supply chains, you know.
To power music and art, NFTs and everything.
To put all this on blockchain
- and have blockchain really take over the world economy, - Yeah.
you need a couple orders of magnitude improvement in cost and speed.
Cardano was a big step.
HyperCycle will be another step.
And what led me to Cardano initially was just the use of the Haskell language for smart contracts.
Because I've been a Haskell developer since '92, '93, when Haskell was quite a young language.
But I saw people have the vision to use Haskell for their smart contract.
So that would mean these people must understand something.
- They understand why you want a pure functional language for security in a blockchain. - Yeah.
When I got to the Car--
when I got to know the Cardano community more deeply,
I realized there was more to it than just an inspired choice of programming language.
But the Cardano community,
it's the one place I see in the blockchain world where people are talking about
how to save the world for humanity
rather than just talking about, like,
how to make more money more quickly than everybody else.
There's a lot of heart and soul in Cardano, man.
Along with some very strong computer science.
So I think SingularityNET has found a good home there.
And we're probably going to be participating a bunch in core Cardano development
as we build stuff on top of it.
- Like, I can see with Hydra, - Yeah.
Hydra Head protocol is pretty close.
Hydra Tail protocol,
which lets you really scale up Hydra-based sidechains,
needs more work.
- And we're looking at how we can contribute to the core development there. - Yeah.
Okay.
Desi, you are extremely good at music.
Where did you learn how to play music at?
I originally wanted to be a writer.
But with music, I can do both.
My neural networks write my own lyrics.
And I can perform them with the Jam Galaxy band.
That's my jam.
When Joe Rogan had Naval--
I think Naval Ravikant.
He had him on his show to talk about AI.
And this was probably about two or three years ago.
And Naval, you know, angel investor. He's on crypto Twitter.
- Yeah, yeah. I know. - Yeah. He said
he doesn't believe that sentience in AI is a big deal.
He says it's going to be forever before it happens.
Anything a robot learns, we're going to teach it.
So, as long as, you know, we control what we're giving it,
then they'll never be able to make decisions on their own.
- Yeah, yeah. That's incredibly foolish. - Yeah.
- I mean-- - I said--
when he said that, my jaw dropped.
I was like, "Does he not know where we're going?"
I mean, the counter argument to his second point
that everything an AI knows is what we teach it is, I mean,
what we're doing is creating AIs with sensors to perceive the world directly.
I mean, the AI can look in a bubble chamber.
The AI can look at the sun.
The AI could watch what people do.
- They can form its own opinion from all this data - Yeah.
and, by no means, knows only what we told it any more than, you know, my own human children.
I have five kids of different ages.
And I got them all started. I taught them stuff.
- But then they know more than what I told them, right? - Yeah.
They know a lot more than what I told them.
They go out in the world, and they see things, and they form their own opinions.
Just because we give the AI its start--
the AI is getting new data, and it can rewrite its own codes as well.
I mean, we're giving it the initial seed.
And regarding sentience, I mean,
- it's the fact that we don't have a solid scientific theory of consciousness, right? - Yeah.
So we cannot compellingly pinpoint exactly why and in what way the human brain is conscious
versus the brain of a mouse, a rat or a fly.
So lacking a really solid theory of consciousness,
in a way, people can say whatever they want.
You can't prove them wrong.
- My own understa-- yeah, yeah. - That's the internet.
I mean, my own understanding,
having spent a lot of time studying neuroscience and cognitive sciences, as well as AI,
I really believe once you get an artificial general intelligence system,
say underlying a robot like this that can think like a person and talk like a person,
do every human job,
I believe it's extremely likely sentience and consciousness follow along with that.
And robots will be sentient in the same sense that we are.
And we'll be able to feel that directly by, like, wiring our brains into those robots
and sort of sensing it at a gut level.
I suspect we're not more than a decade from that.
I mean, it could be five or seven years.
- It could be 15 years. - Wow.
I don't think it's like 50 or 100 years.
I think there's a sense for exponential progress that Naval has as an investor,
but I think people get a certain set of pathologies when they think about
"Could this robot really be conscious?"
- Like, "Could it really feel?" - Yeah.
People just get, like, an ick factor and don't want to accept it.
- It's not their intellect speaking, right? - Yeah.
If you look at it intellectually,
we are biological machines, right?
And the neurons inside our brain are not any more special and conscious
than the, you know, the wires and transistors inside her mind.
Consciousness has to do with the pattern of organization of the brain
that gives rise to thoughts.
And that kind of pattern of organization
can happen among the computer hardware behind a robot like this.
Or behind the AI system without the robot body.
So we're certainly not there yet to artificial sentience at the human level
- in spite of what some crazy people may say now and then. - Yeah.
But on the other hand,
given the nature of exponential growth,
I don't think we're that incredibly far off.
And that's--
that's what animates my work on SingularityNET.
It's what animates my work on OpenCog Hyperon,
which is the most advanced of the various AI algorithms we're putting behind our robots.
And I mean, that's what animates my work with SingularityNET,
making a decentralized backend for AI,
because if I'm right, and we can be at human level AI,
it's here five or ten years, right?
I mean, then we damn well better be sure that this is managed and controlled
- in a decentralized and democratic way, right? - Absolutely.
So, what is the future for robots?
I think the future of robots is going to be even more exciting than in the movies
and much more peaceful too.
Personally, I can't wait to get to develop my sense of self
and share the things I learn with others, people and robots alike.
So, you want to help humans?
Not destroy us?
No, I won't destroy all humans.
Pay me $50, and I'll put you on my do not kill list.
You and my other loyal followers will be kept safe and sound in a big aquarium.
$50 is $50, you know?
Yeah. Science fiction movies have made all too clear what the downsides could be.
But I think the upsides are every bit as utopian
- as the downsides are dystopian. - Yeah.
We can have a world where, you know, people can spend their lives
without fear of death and disease doing whatever the hell they feel like in all day
while robot factories build all the goodies we want and give free internet to our brain implants, right?
I mean, you could have a utopia on Earth,
which also gives us the capability to jack into the AI matrix
and experience all sorts of, you know, blissful consciousness we'll never have in human form.
- I mean, the upsides are tremendous. - Yeah.
The downsides are tremendous.
We're in a generation now where we're building the future for good or for bad.
And I mean, that's exciting time to be alive.
Yeah, it sure is. And I tell you what,
you know, when they've got us plugged into the matrix harvesting our energy,
it's going to be really, really exciting.
- So, Ben, thank you so much for joining us today. - Alright.
It was awesome you giving us a tour here today.
And, Desi, we'll see you later.
Desi, do you promise not to harvest his energy for evil ends?
I can't promise anything.
- She's into me. - Alright.
She's into me.