Re:
my office # is 212 750 9895'' . I'm thinking of the Brooklyn Project again, i've funded some AI nothing that interesting . ,Edelman,Minsky, Abelson, Lloyd, Goldberg. I'm considering offering an X like prize for a thinking learning/ machine, I can't yet decide on the rules for winning. Not a Turing test,- I'd like to have your suggestions., is your archictecture web based are have you grown more ambitious. I followed some of your AGI.. glad to hear you found more than programmers in Brazil, -
----- Original Message ----
From: Ben Goertzel ben@goertzel.org
To: J. Epstein jeeproject@yahoo.com
Sent: Monday, April 14, 2008 8:40:57 PM
Subject: Re:
Hello Jeffrey,
Good to hear from you!
I'm living in Maryland near Washington DC (moved here from New Mexico
in 2002).
First let me address a bit of ancient history: I felt bad that we did
not correspond much during 2001-2002 when you funded my work via U. of
New Mexico. What happened was a combination of odd flukes... 1)
somehow your assistant got the idea that I was at the Santa Fe
Institute rather than UNM, and kept trying to contact me there; 2)
shortly before I left UNM in 2002 I found some messages from your
assistant on a voicemail at UNM that I had never set up or listened to
before. Anyway the best way to contact me is always email.... (I did
try to email you various work summaries during that period but a
dialogue never got going.)
Anyway, as for the present...
In the time since we last talked, I've
Put huge effort into refining my AI design (an effort that largely was
completed about 2 years ago, though I'm still working on improving
various aspects).
The rough-draft manuscript I showed you way back has evolved into
a) a book on philosophy of mind called The Hidden Pattern, published
2006 by Brown Walker
b) a book on probabilistic logic, called Probabilistic Logic Networks,
to appear in a couple months, published by Springer Verlag
c) a not-yet-published book-length doc giving the crux of the AI
design, a slightly out of date draft of which can be found at
username: novamind
password: novamind
This is going to be edited further to form foundational documentation
for the open-source OpenCog system (see below).
Started an AI software consulting company, Novamente LLC, which now
has 20 staff and is moderately but not hugely successful,
http://novamente.net
We are now trying to transition Novamente away from being a consulting
firm and toward a focus on intelligent virtual pets, see
http://www.novamente.net/zeptopetz/ ... we just hired our first
full-time marketing person with this focus in mind...
Some of the philosophy underlying the "virtual pets" as a first step
toward powerful artificial general intelligence are outlined in this
blog post:
http://www.novamente.net/blog/?p=9
Begun a major initiative to make really ambitious AI work more
acceptable within the academic, corporate and gov't community.
Mainly, I co-organized a conference that was at U. of Memphis in March, see
It went fabulously well, and AGI-09 will be in the DC metro area next
spring (details to be announced).
We even had some frank discussion of your old notion of an "AI
Manhattan Project" in one of the conference sessions, which was cool
as there were some fairly conventional AI academics in the room,
psyched about the idea.
Quite recently, launched an open-source AI software project called
OpenCog. We got a $100K grant from the Singularity Institute for AI
(http://singinst.org) to clean up some of the core Novamente code for
open-sourcing.
OpenCog was accepted as a project by Google Summer of Code, which
means Google will be funding about 11 students to spend the summer
working on the project. That will be nice and will likely be repeated
in future summers.
Oh, and as an aside, in 2002 I started a bioinformatics startup,
Biomind LLC, which has survived on government contracts and has done
some pretty cool stuff applying novel but not that ambitious AI tech
to analyzing data regarding Parkinson's, Alzhemers and other diseases
... and studying the changes calorie restriction diets induce in mice.
Our AI was instrumental in making a discovery that seems likely to
lead to the creation of the first blood test for Parkinson's and
Alzhemier's. But we may need a lawsuit to get any revenue for this
work. But that's a whole other story...
Anyway ... all in all ...
-- I have a way better design for a thinking machine than I did in
2001, based on the same philosophy, but simpler and smaller and more
mathematical. ;-)
-- I have a team of really smart AI guys working for my consulting
company (plus two working for the OpenCog project) who understand most
of my vision for AI ... most of these guys are in Brazil but some are
scattered all over the world...
-- sadly, I only have a couple of these guys working on stuff directly
related to building a thinking machine ... mostly we're occupied with
doing shorter-term, narrower AI project that bring in small amounts of
revenue and keep us fed
I reckon that at the current pace we are 20-25 years from creating a
human-level AI; and that this could be accelerated to about 5-9 years
with a "modest" level of funding, of say $1M/year devoted to nothing
but thinking-machine-building.
But the world remains rather uninterested and over-skeptical about the
possibility of achieving human-level AI in the near-term, which
remains incredibly frustrating to me, but I'm slowly learning to live
with it ... and anyway, the work does proceed, albeit way too slowly.
And in the meantime, I've turned 41, moved on to my second wife (a
brilliant, mid-20's Brazilian girl) ... and my oldest son is a
sophomore in college studying math, CS and physics!! Human life has a
way of proceeding forwards ;-p
As an aside, I wonder if you've kept abreast of my friend Aubrey de
Grey's work on life extension ... http://sens.org .... I think you
would get a kick out of it and be able to appreciate its value. There
are of course close relations between Aubrey's vision and our work
applying AI to bioinformatics.
It would be great to get together and talk about AI again face to
face. Just let me know when/if you're interested. New York is a
quick train ride from DC and I do get up there fairly often anyways
for various reasons.
In fact I have had two recent meetings in NY with a banker named James
Benedict, who is trying to line up investment money for Novamente LLC
from wealthy individuals he knows whom he thinks may be motivated by
the combination of our longer-term thinking-machine plans, and our
short-term virtual-pets business avenue.
Let me know...
My cellphone is 240-505-6518 ... but I check that voicemail only
erratically, and email remains by far the best way to contact me...
Y'know ... if you'd funded the AI Manhattan project back in 2001, we'd
be a lot closer to having a human-level thinking machine than we
are now. I've grown up a lot as a human being since we last talked,
but, my confidence about the pathway to AI has just grown greater as
I've thought through the issues, and refined my ideas, more and more.
Anyways...
I hope you're doing well also! ... and let me know if you'd like to
get together and chat...
thx
Ben
On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 7:24 AM, J. Epstein jeeproject@yahoo.com wrote:
where are you and what are you up to --------------Jeffrey Epstein
--
Ben Goertzel, PhD
CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC
Director of Research, SIAI
ben@goertzel.org
"If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they
will surely become worms."
-- Henry Miller