Artificial General Intelligence

“Only a small community has concentratedon general intelligence. No one has tried to make a thinking machine . . . The bottom line is that we really haven’t progressed too far toward a truly intelligent machine. We have collections of dumb specialists in small domains; the true majesty of general intelligence still awaits our attack. . . . We have got to get back to the deepest questions of AI and general intelligence. . . ” –MarvinMinsky as interviewed in Hal’s Legacy, edited by David Stork, 2000. Our goal in creating this edited volume has been to ?ll an apparent gap in the scienti?c literature, by providing a coherent presentation of a body of contemporary research that, in spite of its integral importance, has hitherto kept a very low pro?le within the scienti?c and intellectual community. This body of work has not been given a name before; in this book we christen it “Arti?cial General Intelligence” (AGI). What distinguishes AGI work from run-of-the-mill “arti?cial intelligence” research is that it is explicitly focused on engineering general intelligence in the short term. We have been active researchers in the AGI ?eld for many years, and it has been a pleasure to gather together papers from our colleagues working on related ideas from their own perspectives. In the Introduction we give a conceptual overview of the AGI ?eld, and also summarize and interrelate the key ideas of the papers in the subsequent chapters.

The chief editor of the book, Dr. Ben Goertzel, has published 4 research treatises in AI, cognitive science and systems theory, a biography of Linus Pauling, and one previous edited volume (in the area of dynamical psychology), as well as numerous research papers (for his CV, see www.goertzel.org/ben/newResume.htm).

Dr. Ben Goertzel has been involved in AI research and application development since the late 1980’s. He holds a PhD in mathematics from Temple University, and over the period 1989-1997 he held several university faculty positions in mathematics, computer science, and psychology, in the US, New Zealand and Australia.

Dr. Goertzel is author of numerous research papers and journalistic articles, a biography of Linus Pauling, and five scholarly books dealing with topics in the cognitive sciences, including Chaotic Logic (Plenum Press, 1994), and Creating Internet Intelligence (Plenum Press, 2001). 

Currently, as CEO of the software firms Biomind LLC and Novamente LLC, he is leading a team of AI researchers in the development and commercialization of Artificial General Intelligence technology.

Cassio Pennachin has been leading software development projects since the mid-1990's, in artificial intelligence, bioinformatics, operations research and other areas.  Prior to taking on his current role as CTO of Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC, he served as founder and CEO of Vetta Technologies, a Brazil-based software consulting firm, and he led a team developing mass spectrometry data analysis software for Proteometrics.  From 1998-2001 Cassio was the former VP of R&D at Webmind Inc., leading several projects in AI, data mining and information retrieval.  

Ben and Cassio are the chief architects of the Novamente AI Engine, one of the AGI projects described in the book.