AGI-15 @ Berlin
Our Itamar Arel, Joscha Bach, Eric Baum, Antonio Chella, Stan Franklin,
Deon Garrett, Ben Goertzel, Marcus Hutter, Matthew Iklé, Randal Koene,
Kai-Uwe Kühnberger, Moshe Looks, Alexey Potapov, Rafal Rzepka, Jürgen
Schmidhuber, Claes Strannegård, Kristinn Thórisson, Julian Togelius, Pei
Wang, David Weinbaum (Weaver), and Roman Yampolskiy are participating in
The Eighth Conference on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI-15) which
will be held July 22–25, 2015 at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of
Sciences and Humanities, Germany.
This conference gathers an international group of leading academic and
industry researchers involved in scientific and engineering work aimed
directly toward the goal of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
Interactive Friendly-AI
Thanks to support at FLI, we have decided to submit a proposal at
http://futureoflife.org/grants/large/initial
Below is our proposed project summary. Note that this summary is limited
to 500 words. If the initial proposal is accepted, then a much more
detailed full proposal will be created in a few months.
Let us know if you have comments on this proposal or would like to
support it with time or money.
Project Summary
Currently most Friendly AI research just produces papers and nothing to
attract the public's interest. Considering how much more money is being
invested in nonfriendly AI than Friendly AI we think it would be worth
spending some money on Interactive Friendly AI so we could 1) get the
public's interest and hopefully encourage more Friendly AI
interest/research 2) help develop algorithms that will be applicable to
future Friendly AI efforts.
Our project has dual goals: 1) education, for making a chatbot aimed at
clarifying what the risks and benefits of AI are, and discussing the
various approaches to them and related considerations, dispelling
misconceptions, etc. 2) beefing up the directedness and credibility of
the actual research to actually make an AI friendly.
We plan on spending half of our funding on each goal. Why have dual
goals? Because goal #2 is more difficult and we wish to guarantee that
the project will be at least partially successful. Note that we will
have different people working on each goal so there will be less
temptation to take shortcuts on the research front for goal #2.
Our overall plan for developing Interactive Friendly AI is that all of
our efforts will be put into the development of a chatbot that is only
able to converse about Friendly AI subjects. To make the chatbot worth
interacting with to the public, we will have the chatbot fall back to
one of the world's best chatbots for general questions. We have spoken
to the people behind the Loebner Prize Winner 2013 and they have agreed
to do this.
We will develop multiple Friendly AI engines to converse about Friendly
AI subjects. While at least one of these engines will be based on AIML
2.0 or ChatScript, we will also work on engines based on goal directed
agency, autonomous decision making, semantic comprehension, ability for
self-modification, etc. It is hoped that the fairly narrow focus of the
Friendly AI engines will make it easier to experiment with advanced AI
methods. Users will be given the choice to pick which of our Friendly AI
engines that they wish to chat with.
Key goals within the Friendly AI engine architecture will be to develop
empathy and to build datasets that demonstrate that a peaceful
cooperative world is better than a hostile violent world. It is hoped
that all of our Friendly AI engine efforts will contain useful
algorithms for these key goals. (So these algorithms could be used by
more advanced programs in the future...)
We plan on continuing to work on this project even after FLI funding is
used up as we think that a world with Friendly AI is an important
objective to try to achieve. We, of course, wouldn't mind additional
funding in the future if FLI is happy with our progress after a year has
passed.
We have a lot of top scientists at http://lifeboat.com/ex/boards#robotics
and will work to solicit their help on our Friendly AI engines and improve
them over time.
Reports
Read the report "Planetary Defense: Operations & Execution" at http://lifeboat.com/reports/planetary.defense.pdf
Blog Contest
We are launching a blog contest! Anyone who posts to our blog gets a
chance to win a signed copy of "The Utopia Experiment" which tells the
true story of a real-life attempt to simulate life after the collapse of
global civilization. Learn about "The Utopia Experiment" at
http://amzn.to/1KO6BVM
The deadline for the contest is February 28. If you need access to our
blog, send an email with the subject of "Lifeboat Foundation blog" to
Blog
Seth Cochran joins our blog team with the post "Doomsday Clock Now Three
Minutes to Midnight" at
http://lifeboat.com/blog/2015/01/doomsd...midnight
Other recent interesting blog posts include:
"Bitcoin is just the first app to use blockchain technology
(Understanding the value of the blockchain above and beyond bitcoin)" by
Rob Chamberlain at
http://lifeboat.com/blog/2015/01/bitcoi...-bitcoin
"Bitcoin Will End the Nation State" by Travis Patron at
http://lifeboat.com/blog/2015/01/bitcoi...on-state
"Black Phosphorus: The Birth of a New Wonder Material" by Seb at
http://lifeboat.com/blog/2015/01/black-...material
"Coinbase releases first licensed US Bitcoin exchange; Winklevoss twins
gear up to do the same" by Chris Evans at
http://lifeboat.com/blog/2015/01/coinba...the-same
"Cutting Edge Microsoft HoloLens is an Augmented Virtual Reality
Computer for Your Face" by Seb at
http://lifeboat.com/blog/2015/01/the-hi...e-uterus
"Dr. Aubrey de Grey: When Do You Want to Die?" by Johnny Boston at
http://lifeboat.com/blog/2015/01/dr-aub...t-to-die
"Dr. Ken Hayworth, Part 3: If we can build a brain, what is the future
of I?" by Johnny Boston at
http://lifeboat.com/blog/2015/01/ken-ha...-a-brain
"Elon Musk Donates $10 Million to Protect the World From AI" by Seb at
http://lifeboat.com/blog/2015/01/elon-m...-from-ai
"First Robotics--Who Are the Celebrities of the Future?" by Johnny Boston at
http://lifeboat.com/blog/2015/01/first-...future-2
"IBM Reveals Proof of Concept for Blockchain-Powered Internet of Things"
by Rob Chamberlain at
http://lifeboat.com/blog/2015/01/ibm-re...f-things
"An Internet of Treacherous Things" by Seb at
http://lifeboat.com/blog/2015/01/an-int...s-things
"Legal Consulting Firm Believes Artificial Intelligence Could Replace
Lawyers by 2030" by Rob Chamberlain at
http://lifeboat.com/blog/2015/01/legal-...-by-2030
"Tech giants quietly investing in Synthetic Biology" by Seb at
http://lifeboat.com/blog/2015/01/tech-g...-biology
"Who is FM2030?" by Johnny Boston at
http://lifeboat.com/blog/2015/01/who-is-fm2030
Growing Membership
Recent donations/pledges we have received since our last newsletter:
Willard H. Wells: $500,
Humberto Castaneda: $200,
Anonymous: $160,
John Ratnaswamy: $100,
Michael Dickey: $85,
Sergio M.L. Tarrero: $85,
Philippe Van Nedervelde: $85,
Kenneth P. Weiss: $85,
Tihamer 'Tee' Toth-Fejel: $50,
Charles V. Weir: $50,
Sam Gutterman: $25,
Matthew L. McGuirl: $25,
Joanne Pransky: $25,
David Weiss: $25,
Jeffrey L. Simmons: $15,
Rebecca R. Cooper: $10,
Thomas Dolphin: $10,
Alexander Macrae: $10,
Aaron Mayzes: $10,
Philip Morehead: $10,
Elizabeth Parrish: $10,
Roland Schiefer: $10,
Kelley White-Ricks: $10,
My Books: $5,
and Remote Warehouse: $5.
Our Join Us page at https://lifeboat.com/ex/join.us now allows you to
pay for your membership anywhere from monthly to every ten years.
