With the recent release of the iPhone 16, which Apple has promised is optimized for artificial intelligence, it’s clear that AI is officially front of mind, once again, for the average consumer. Yet the technology still remains rather limited compared with the vast abilities the most forward-thinking AI technologists anticipate will be achievable in the near future.
As much excitement as there still is around the technology, many still fear the potentially negative consequences of integrating it so deeply into society. One common concern is that a sufficiently advanced AI could determine humanity to be a threat and turn against us all, a scenario imagined in many science fiction stories. However, according to a leading AI researcher, most people’s concerns can be alleviated by decentralizing and democratizing AI’s development.
On Episode 46 of The Agenda podcast, hosts Jonathan DeYoung and Ray Salmond separate fact from fiction by speaking with Ben Goertzel, the computer scientist and researcher who first popularized the term “artificial general intelligence,” or AGI. Goertzel currently serves as the CEO of SingularityNET and the ASI Alliance, where he leads the projects’ efforts to develop the world’s first AGI.
The true power of artificial general intelligence
Goertzel defined an AGI as “an AI that can do the whole scope of everything that people can do, including the human ability to leap beyond what we’ve been taught.” This differs from the more narrow AIs that have been around for a while, which “do some highly specific things but don’t try to have the whole broad scope of a human mind.”
While large language models like ChatGPT are capable of performing many general tasks, they don’t qualify as artificial general intelligence because they don’t venture far beyond their training, said Goertzel.
There are many potentially world-changing benefits that would come from developing an AGI. “We can abolish material scarcity at the level of everyday human life, just like we can drum up all the steaks that our dog wants to eat,” Goertzel said. “We don’t have to work for a living anymore. Things like death and disease should be curable by nanotechnology, which an advanced AI presumably could create.”
“I mean, the abolition of scarcity, death and disease, these are very large upsides, going beyond the smaller upsides that we see talked about in the media all the time, like self-driving cars and drones delivering your Amazon stuff to your doorstep and so on.”
Related: OriginTrail on AI, real-world adoption and the value of knowledge: The Agenda podcast
How to safely develop artificial general intelligence
However, a powerful AGI is not without its risks. Goertzel told The Agenda that while a Terminator-style world-ending apocalypse is highly unlikely — though it can’t entirely be ruled out — there are other risks inherent in its development. “The idea that human beings could take moderately advanced AIs and use them to do nasty things to other human beings out of their own self-interest, this is a very, very, very clear and palpable risk,” he shared.
“If you look at how we’re operating the world right now as a species, and you think about introducing AI that’s roughly as smart as people, the most obvious thing to happen is that large corporations use these AIs to make themselves more money, and countries with large militaries use these AIs to get themselves more power.”
The way to avoid these concerns and ensure that AGI is used for the benefit of all humanity is to decentralize and democratize it, according to Goertzel. That way, it cannot be controlled “by a small number of powerful parties with their own narrow interests at heart.”
“What you need is some way to decentralize all these processes that the AI is running on, and then you need a way to decentralize the data ingestion into all these processors,” he argued. “This is what SingularityNET was designed to provide. […] Singularity lets you take a collection of AI agents and run them on machines which are owned and controlled by no central party.”
“This is the right way to roll out AI for the good of humanity.”
To hear more from Goertzel’s conversation with The Agenda — including his thoughts on how AGI could extend the human lifespan, what Hollywood gets right and wrong about AI, and whether AGI will unlock the secrets of the universe — listen to the full episode on Cointelegraph’s Podcasts page, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And don’t forget to check out Cointelegraph’s full lineup of other shows!
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This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.