Approach to AGI
From AGIRI.org
Mission: Foster the creation of powerful and ethically positive Artificial General Intelligence.
The field of AI began with dreams of creating machines with human-level and even superhuman intelligence. But over the years it has drifted into a focus on "narrow AI" -- software programs that deal exclusively with specific areas like chess, medical diagnosis, mathematics, vision or robot arm control. These programs are very good at what they do, but they lack the ability to generalize their knowledge across different domains, as well the ability to reflect on themselves or create fundamental innovations and insights. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) has been pushed into the margins of the AI discipline.
AGIRI -- the Artificial General Intelligence Research Institute -- is a growing team of individuals committed to bucking the trend toward AI conservatism, and explicitly working toward the grand goal of true artificial general intelligence.
We realize that AGI is a huge quest, in which success is far from guaranteed. But, in the words of Sir Edmund Hilary (the first to ascend Everest), "Never venture, never win."
The potential payoff is, after all, spectacular. As many futurist thinkers have observed, true AI may be the last big innovation humans ever make. Because if one can create a software program with roughly human level general intelligence, this program will most likely be able to learn to program and do AI theory -- and thus to improve its own intelligence.
The creation of a real AGI thus has the potential to lead to a process of exponentially increasing computational intelligence, resulting in software whose intelligence and general capability vastly exceeds that of human beings. The existence of such software could lead to radical transformation of the human race itself, and to further developments we humans (with our small brains) literally can't even dream of.
Individuals concerned with the more futuristic and speculative aspects of AI may enjoy AGIRI founder Dr. Goertzel's online writings in the Dynamical Psychology e-journal, and on Dr. Goertzel's personal website. For example, Dr. Goertzel's thoughts on the Singularity as related to Novamente and other AGI projects are given in his 2004 article Encouraging a Positive Transcension. These issues are dealt with more thoroughly in Dr. Goertzel's forthcoming book The Path to Posthumanity.
What differentiates AGIRI from many other techno-visionaries, however, is that we are specifically concerned with fostering concrete plans for actually moving toward these goals. Although our work is guided by ambitious long-term visions, our strategy for realizing these visions is practical and down-to-earth. We are committed to spreading the word about AGI to the general public, and increasing the visibility of AGI research in the academic and commercial worlds. But most of all we are committed to encouraging work on actually creating AGI.
In agreement with this pragmatic approach, AGIRI is sponsored by the commercial firm Novamente LLC, which is aimed at bringing one particular AGI design, the Novamente Cognition Engine, into reality. But AGIRI itself is not focused on Novamente, but is rather oriented toward the promotion of any and all practical, ethically careful AGI work and practically-useful AGI theory and discussion.
