Next steps...?

Hi Jeffrey,

It was great meeting with you F2F ... definitely higher-bandwidth than
a phone call, so I'm glad I came up there in person

I'm pleased that you see the real importance of the Novamente /
OpenCog AI work my colleagues and I are doing.

Like I said, if we are adequately funded then in a few years we quite
plausibly can have a "virtual 4 year old child"
controlling a body in an online virtual world. And from there, all
sorts of possibilities are within reach -- one has
an intelligent system that one can instruct using language, and whose
brain one can fully inspect and improve.

We didn't even talk about the next step: teaching the young AI some
computer programming and AI theory so
that it can improve its own mind, faster and better than any human
could. That is what really will lead to amazing
things, but actually I think the hard part is the earlier step of
getting to the virtual child. After that, the following
steps will be much easier because we will be operating based on a
practical understanding of how to create
artificial minds. Similarly to how once the first airplane was
built, making faster and faster planes was not
THAT much of a challenge compared to making the first (albeit crappy) one....

Anyway, I think you said the next step was that you wanted me and a
couple colleagues to join you at Harvard
to talk to some other folks there. That sounds good to me, so if you
want to do it, let's coordinate on dates.

I do think it would be optimal to have the whole AGI project we're
discussing localized in one place, just in terms
of the conceptual cross-pollination that comes from physical
colocation. However, I note that moving ME
from DC is gonna be hard, because I have a shared custody arrangement
w/my ex-wife. Yes, money solves
these problems, but some of the money would then have to be directed
toward my ex-wife I guess ... 'cause
I'm not gonna leave my kids even for AGI (damn that human biology
controlling our brains, huh???). But,
if a project were set up in NY or Boston I could be there 3 days/week,
for example.

Anyway, I'm very psyched about these possibilities and eager to keep
things moving. So, please stay out of
jail, and let's take this to the next step ;-)

thx
Ben

--
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