Block O2O Blockchain Summit - Fireside Chat: Dr. Ben Goertzel and Dr. Noah Silverman

so we're waiting for the PowerPoint for now okay for now so we could do it backwards and have the debate first and PowerPoint after yeah which means she's winning the debate because he gets to make the last the final case do you want to jump in or should I sure sure so uh I may be giving a presentation about this once the logistics are worked out but for the moment I'll just give a verbal introduction so I'm a mathematician originally and I've been working on AI since even before I got my PhD in math 30 years ago and I came to the realization a few years ago that putting AI on the blockchain and creating a sort of self-organizing marketplace of a eyes that could both serve customers and serve each other and then your act with each other on the blockchain I came to the conclusion that this solved two problems that were very very important to me and what one problem is how to transition from narrow AI AIS that do only one little thing to AGI artificial general intelligence to have an AI that can really learn reasoning and generalize beyond what it seemed to be creative and the other problem was to make AI develop in the in a democratic and participatory way so that everyone on the planet can not only benefit from the AI but participate in in the guidance of that AI as it grows rather than having AI be controlled by by a small number of large institutions well when it hit me that a blockchain based decentralized infrastructure for community of interacting eyes was the way both to create powerful AGI and to make AI democratic and participatory I mean that's when I realized I had to build what ultimately became singularity net and you know we did a successful token sale for this toward the end of last year now we've been staffing up our team and starting to to actually build the thing which brings a whole other set of challenges and toward the end of this year we should roll out a scalable version of singularity net and begin ramping up utilization by software developers on by customers on the other hand who need our services and all right now we've gone straight to the end of the presentation we're done well done fantastic all right do you guys back it up for us you can watch the whole presentation backwards no that's it that's a test of human intelligence if I know what backwards will you still get it yeah all right well I just summarized the whole thing for you but no um is there a device I could use to advance the present for now I'll get one for you okay all right all right next that's your clue next yeah artificial intelligence is everywhere we all know that it's quite striking to those like myself who've been I got my PhD 30 years ago and AI most of that time no one really took it seriously it's something that could impact the world during our lifetimes now all of a sudden you know it when you go to the gas station the guy pumping the gas ask you about AI it's it's a astoundingly popular and with good reason I'm it's being used across every area of Industry now in ways that people can see for face recognition self-driving cars automated trading and on and on next but as exciting as it is the state of AI now is it's not yet at the level of AI from from science fiction novels and so forth there's a lot of limitations what we have now is narrow AI we have AI programs each of which does an extremely specific thing and when you deviate from the conditions for which it was designed it's not it's not intelligent anymore and furthermore AI is controlled in a very top-down way by a few large companies and government agencies which also limits the scope of applications because it's mainly applied to the things of interest to those companies so these these are limitations and I think we can overcome them and the narrowness of the AI algorithms and the top-down control of AI from an economic standpoint has fostered a lack of cooperation among AI it's like each AI is so if its own thing living in its own island dropped up in a proprietary software hardware application you don't have a community of a is where all the AIS are sharing with each other and learning from each other and coordinating together into larger AI networks next so this yeah this is why we created singularity net with with a number of different goals in mind we want to move from a bunch of narrow AIS to an integrated general intelligence we want to supply a much wider variety of functions to the world than what AI now does with the limited business models behind it and we want to ensure or at least maximize the odds that AI is applied for the common good of everyone rather than for the good of just a small group of controlling parties next so the key ingredient that the singularity net platform adds is to ease the cooperation of different ai's toward achieving common goals next singularity net is a platform that enables one to coordinate multiple AIS at large scales so the different AIS in the network can outsource work to each other and exchange data and information and cooperate and learn how to cooperate in the course of solving problems next so obviously this is a very complicated thing and I'm not going to be able to explain the full details of the of the architecture here but if we draw out what we're building there's a blockchain or other distributed ledger at the bottom accompanied with various off chain interactions then you sort of present that in an abstract way to your to your AI algorithm so from the point of view of an AI algorithm it shouldn't matter much whether it's running on aetherium neon them or or even something that's not a blockchain as we currently conceive it but it's developed in a few years so you have a sort of abstraction layer between the blockchain and the AI algorithms then you have AI algorithms which can be deep neural nets evolutionary learning logical reasoning they could be our OpenCog general intelligence architecture that can be something I've never heard of that some random hacker from Turkmenistan is cooked up and put on the network and then you have application developers building vertical market specific solutions on top of these AI algorithms which could be aimed at medicine finance banking robotics where that whatever the customers want then these algorithms and these solutions and applications they operate together in a marketplace where end users can buy and sell services and the AIS that are serving the end users can themselves outsource work to other AIS so it's a marketplace in which AI is buy and sell trade with each other as well as a marketplace that humans and their software products on the outside use to buy and sell AI services and that that marketplace is where our cryptographic token the AI token play plays a role and one of the things we're doing with this is using it as a platform for delivering our OpenCog artificial intelligence engine which is something I've been working on for 20 years really although we open sourced it as open coglin only ten years ago and the OpenCog engine underlies the AI of the sofia humanoid robot and it also underlies a bioinformatics project I've been working on with some folks in Shenzhen Hong Kong called matzoh using a I'd analyzed genetics data and these are just two examples of applications of OpenCog which were integrating with singularity net platform next so yeah the motes our product lets you chat with an AI which is a sort of artificial scientist assistant and then explore vast amounts of genomics data and this ties in with other projects which are letting people put their DNA data and other medical data on the blockchain so they can control and monetize their own medical data this supplies AI tools and let people analyze this data and that researchers analyze this data in a decentralized ecosystem rather than a centralized ecosystem of big pharma companies and whatnot next and this Sofia robot you know this is constructed by a separate company Hanson robotics who I've been working with as chief scientist for a number of years what we're doing now is working on using singularity and OpenCog to upgrade Sofia's intelligence next and among other projects we've been using OpenCog and singularity net to enable Sophia to be a meditation assistant which is kind of cool she she looks in your eyes tells you to take a deep breath and and calm down visualize yourself floating with a robot in an empty space and you know we're doing some systematic trials of this and for many people this actually helps to get into a quite deep meditation state that they were unable to get into otherwise next this is a brief video of some trials with it here at Hong Kong Paulo you unfortunately we don't see being sound from the presentation but I guess that silence is the essence of meditation anyway right so we've the robot was looking this guy in the eyes and sort of coaching Liam through a meditation session and this particular guy I mean in the post interview he found that he'd been trying to meditate for years and with humans in the group and by himself he hadn't been able to do it and using our AI engine controlling the robot actually helped which is is really really quite interesting and this is just one among a host of different applications we can do and as we get more and more different a is integrated into singularity that there's more and more amazing applications you can do I mean some of them about making people money AR AI for a financial trading and whatnot but some some are really about just doing good like curing diseases and helping people achieve achieve states of consciousness they haven't been able to get into before next so we can use this to connect different robots together where multiple robots see and do different things but their minds all connect in the singularity net in the AI mind cloud next and of course not just robots Internet of Things play it plays a role here also we can interoperate singular unit with a number of different blockchain specialized for Internet of Things and as sensor networks around the world gather data and supply intelligence all this feeds into the global aiai matrix where who owns each piece of data and who accesses is it's tracked on the blockchain so this emerging global brain of distributed internet intelligence is not a monolithic thing brought by a government or large corporation but it self organizes in the blah same with with collective ownership and guidance next so we're building this now I mean we're in the midst of creating this software platform there's there's an alpha version and we're recruiting partners and we're recruiting AiAi software developers and and and we're building our our community next and this year 2018 toward the end of the year we will launch the first scalable platform with a bunch of commercially viable AI agents on it and we're we're working toward that gradually throughout the year there's a bunch of code to not get home already and then toward the end of this year and through 2019 we'll expand expand the marketplace more and more and we're we're really looking at getting Network effects going similar to what companies like Google Buber Airbnb have done I mean if we can get more and more AI developers putting code in the network more and more users choosing to access AI on our network and serve on Amazon AWS or $0.10 cloud or whatever I mean this can grow to be literally the biggest initiative on the planet and it should be because it's not just a company right it's it's like a digital biological organism it's a protocol that people can use to upload their data to upload AI algorithms and to get all sorts of ai ai services and we're we're putting some of our AI into it such as OpenCog so it's to seed it with intelligence but the crux of it is to create a way for AI is to talk to AI is not source work to a eyes and to do work for people and take data from people and this is this is how you build a decentralized global brain QED good stuff and right on time okay so they brought me up here to play a bit of devil's advocate unfortunately unlike then I don't get to work on a lot of these fun exciting change the world projects I spend my time working very tangibly with different sized companies in banking insurance energy gaming these things modeling sort of tangible problems companies will come to me and say we have a problem we have some data our staff needs to do something with a design and algorithm design some AI for us so in some ways it's it's sort of the opposite of what you're doing whether it's not a generalized AI but it's it's a very narrow and specific use case AI so one of my concerns or one of the questions I see is AI super overused everyone and their mother does AI everyone that can copy and paste ten lines of Python does AI what used to be called automation with a script is now called AI you know what used to be solver and Excel everyone calls AI and on the other hand your things like Sofia which is fantastic AI I don't think the public's educated enough to know the difference so the first sort of challenging question is even if we put this on this fantastic democratized system how do you prevent people from just sort of using copy and paste junk you know garbage in garbage out oh well there's a number of different issues wrapped up and what you just said so I I also spent a lot of my career building narrow ai's for corporate customers and government customers in different domains and I think all that work is valuable the way I'm looking at singularity net is it's a platform where there are special-purpose ai's and more abstract generalization oriented ai's can interact and share information and then you get a greater AI out of the inter operation of these AIS in the network and if you look in the human brain I mean our visual cortex is very specialized right but yet we also have a portion of our brain which is a good at generalization and abstraction so I think the more concrete problem specific a eyes and the more abstraction oriented general eyes all have a role what we're trying to do is build it sort of very sophisticated all to communicate with one another but your your question about how do you stop garbage from accumulating in the network I mean this is we've thought about a lot and so as you saw if you read our white paper we're designing a very sophisticated reputation system for for a singularity net so with when it's human beings raiding other human beings on Airbnb or something it becomes pretty simple I'll give you four stars or 4.5 stars or something on the other hand if it's a is rating other AI is to decide which AI is outsourced to you can have a high dimensional tensor as a reputation structure right I mean you and they I can rate another AI on how well it did in multiple dimensions and in various specific contexts and I think this this this becomes very important and then that becomes a machine learning problem to predict like are these guys gaming the reputation system somehow right so I mean I think it's it's a significant part of building any system like this how do you regulate quality but I think we're we want the network itself to confront that as an AI problem so it becomes a recursive that as a networks intelligence increases it because it can become more intelligent at policing reputation fraud and increasing the accuracy of reputation assessment in the system interesting you touched on two things there the reputation is just to make sense why will people rate the AIS or will other ai's rate the AIS and either way you need some sort of loss function and who decides what the loss function is how you measure o you so Ben you're gonna sit at your laptop all day and reggae eyes we're just going to put a cable in the back to your head that might work better that's why I wear this hat I don't want anyone to see my cortical implant even better yeah just my concern is unfortunately the masses and I go back to so I don't always you know you don't know what you don't know or the infamous what's called the dunning-kruger effect which is people with I mean the masses have these phones and they don't understand very well what's happening in the silicon chip inside the phone doesn't stop them from benefiting from from from the value of the phone there's an old quote I don't know who said it but on these things we have access to most of the knowledge in the world and most people use them to look at pictures of cats porn and argue with strangers most people don't use these for anywhere near what they could be used for so I'm afraid if you just let people vote on AI it may become a popularity contest or trendy thing and and to just continue the thought if we design specific use case AI who decides if it's good and for what use and where or if I'm just gonna put a general deep learning algorithm on there that I copied and pasted in Python and wrapped an API around it and sell it on your network is that really any better than someone coding their own well so I think that the point of having a multi-dimensional reputation system is you can look at who I mean ratings and evaluations go in the blockchain also right right so who evaluated who in what way for what purpose is there and how accurate those those ratings turned out to be in the light of future activities that's also all there right so I mean I mean I mean this all this all feeds in so I think that the transparent and immutable nature of blockchains is is a huge help in combating various pathologies of rating and reputation systems but to address your example of someone who writes ten lines of Python to wrap up tensorflow in an AI agent I mean those AI agents are useful they should be there but if any undergraduate student can write them they become commodities rapidly and then the price will become low but then what what you'll find is as blockchain technologies develop beyond where they are now like with three or five years from now it'll be much cheaper to get these services via a decentralized network like singularity net then via app via Amazon or $0.10 or something right so simple to code AI will become a commodity and sure that's that's as it should be and then there will also be more cutting edge AI than not everyone knows how to implement and there will also be a eyes that have learned a lot from interacting with people and that learning becomes the commodity rather than the software code it's the knowledge that the AI has gained and it's good it's going to be rapidly changing right where there's going to be new AI algorithms every year there's gonna be North's new sources of data every year new types of inter operation but between AI is every year so really what the main drivers of value will be in a decentralized AI network like three or four years from now I don't know and and nobody knows so what we're trying to build is is the protocol by which a eyes of various types can serve each other and serve people across various vertical markets and it it's quite a flexible protocol and just as I mean when when the internet was first introduced people didn't really know what like tcp/ip protocol was gonna be using we're still don't write know but it's used for a lot of different things and it works right so that we're in a way singularity net is like the plumbing for the global brain right and then specific AI tools like our OpenCog engine or like deep neural Nets I mean these live on top of that and they provide specific AI services so I mean not I have my own guesses regarding what kinds of AI are gonna be the most valuable going forward like mine but but singularity that isn't premise taun that right the it could be that three years from now some statistics algorithm that you came out with or some learning engine that some random 16 year old from Eastern Europe came out with is the best thing it's solving all sorts of problems across various markets then that gets rated highest and that's what dominates a singularity that and if that happens right then singularity that still wins it's doing its job sure no that makes sense um just briefly let's let's pivot it away from singularity a bit I wanted to talk touch briefly on the issue will blockchain since that's sort of what this conference is about and we'll probably disagree on this one as well but that's what makes it interesting in my perspective you know a blockchain not the blockchain but a blockchain is really just a ledger or a database and sadly what I'm seeing now is every business out there decides they're gonna put it on the blockchain because it's somehow magically better or it raises evaluation or they raise more funds or they can float an ICO but I would argue 90% of them don't need a blockchain other people say blockchain is gonna change the world so I'm curious what what are your thoughts on sort of misusing blockchain verses I mean yes hilarity not that is an example of a good use of blockchain but what about all the other groups out there putting everything in the world on the blockchain all the other groups out there is a very big in heterogeneous group yes I mean III think blockchain is a transformative technology and you could go through one business or government organization after another and you can see how it could radically improve things so it's like movie production business you know full of corruption full of data all over the place it's badly managed having blockchain there yeah shipping I mean how many forms have to get to filled out in order to ship something from point A to point B how many good not just redesign the user interface for shipping and have one nice Oracle database with a with a proper UX doesn't any open source database my sequel Maria DB take take your pick why why does it need to be blockchain I mean you I mean if you look at big chain DB right I mean which is a blockchain oriented database I mean the early version of that it's Redis with a block chain based in interface right why not just write us you you you you you can you can start you can start that way but now now big chain DB is being absorbed into ocean which is a decentralized data protocol so to me it becomes at that point it becomes as much about governance as anything else it becomes about can you have a network which is a digital biological organism that nobody owns whether the data can live everywhere and nowhere and the data can automatically be moved from one place to another automatically be be replicated any way that no one person or no one company has to control and then there's a lot of work to get to that point though so I think for a company right now much of what they're gonna get by putting the data on the blockchain internally they could probably get in in some other way on the other hand for the world as a whole it's pretty interesting to have all the data about global shipping or global movie production just like on an open blockchain which which is not owned by a few magnets or a few big big Hollywood companies so I think there's a that there's a lot of subtlety there which you'd have to drone to one one industry after after another to look at like look at medicine right so you have 23andme okay you can upload your DNA and it goes into their Oracle database fine on the other hand you could use Shiva mer nebula genomics and you upload your DNA and it's living on the internet it's encrypted and and you you won't you own the key to it right and then if some wants to use it for research they tell you and they end up paying you for it and you can make with it whatever bargain you want right so it's not so much about the database technology but it's about the control structure underlying it so it sounds like from your perspective the real value to blockchain often not always but often is not the technology but the democratization right now yeah because right now block chains are slow and awkward in many ways right but we're early in the development cycle segment right now if you look at all the tools you have on like $0.10 cloud or AWS those tools don't exist decentralized infrastructure now five years from now and maybe that a globally decentralized infrastructure does more than these big companies cloud services so at this moment you're getting a democratization and decentralization which is interesting in terms of the control structure and you're fighting with some in some ways very awkward technologies but we're at the very early stage of development true but I also would argue that a lot of businesses don't want to be decentralized or democratize the film industry I grew up in LA and Hollywood and have friends in the industry they're all private companies for-profit and some of these great movies we see or because the only reason studios produce them is for profit what they do so that I'm involved in the industry in Hollywood and the film companies want blockchain because they want to track everything going on internally because there's massive corruption and no one has a handle on all the leakages of intellectual property and money so they actually do one the blockchain there just to have a way to keep track of everything I mean I've also worked with large companies like Cisco Systems and Cisco as a decentralized autonomous organ I mean if you think about it like no one knows everything happening in that organization it's just like an octopus with earn more than an octopus it's like a thousand tentacled octopus so large organizations they want blockchain just because there's no other technology that will keep track so they want a private blockchain that internally I don't think Cisco wants all other internal financial records I would imagine not know but we're talking about blockchain which is either privately but again why not just use it if its internal why not just use a database set passwords and write permissions to the right parties and a lot of standard database they have a lot of databases [Music] life changes another database right so could you just redesign a proper sequel database and not use it watching well whether you want to use sequel from yeah I mean I think blockchain in itself it's sort of a plumbing layer right and there's a lot of other interesting things that are being built on top of it which are useful and which of those is mote useful in each industry becomes a long story so in the biology domain which I've done a bunch of work in like homomorphic encryption is is valuable because you want to have your personal medical data usable for analytics in certain ways but you don't necessarily want every aspect of your person of your personal medical data to be viewable by the people doing those analytics now you of course you can implement homomorphic encryption on top of an Oracle database also on the other hand what Oracle is actually doing is integrating blockchain into their offerings right I mean as a company so then your your Oracle database will actually be an Oracle suite which uses blockchain for a bunch of different things along with traditional or Oracle technologies so there's there's a collection of technologies there and there's a lot of interesting things of which homomorphic encryption is one for which a blockchain based implementation seems to be the most natural and elegant way to do it that's not to say it's the only way to do it interesting from my perspective I look at any business and I sort of a simple rhe rule test but you know do you need a blockchain this should be like a simple one-page website somewhere one are there multiple parties right in your database if it's only one writer you either trust me you don't doesn't matter the second is do the writers not trust each other for example if you and your wife are both writing to the database and you're the only writers hopefully you trust each other you don't need a box arts company consists of a great number of parties who do not trust each other right and the right and the third test is is there not a third party like an escrow company that you trust so if you can check all three boxes then a blockchain makes sense and for a lot of businesses it might in for other businesses I think it won't for most large businesses or government agencies I've done consulting for they meet those criteria nobody there's no one who everyone trusts fair enough so that's yeah I think this will be an interesting Avenue for a singularity net which is not what we're addressing initially but I mean what once we have a very robust global network of ai's which is running on the blockchain and which has AI is outsourcing work to each other and is smarter than the AI is that big companies are using internally within their private networks then you get into like you know how do we make on-premise copies of part of singularity net and how do you deal with private data management of data and privacy is going to be a complex complex issue with all the different algorithms new sharing needs to be done as much a organizational problem as a software problem right so we're starting with public blocked room and with agents just living publicly I mean dead days encrypted but it's not buying the firewall of some company but there there's no doubt that we'll need to go there and we've talked to a lot of people who want singularity net AI and our OpenCog AI used to help deal with the various computer security based problems because I mean machine learning and machine reasoning for computer security is a huge area but for that things have to run on premise in most cases that's awful with some encryption and some network stuff yeah that seems easy now we've got two and a half minutes left and I want to open a really big can of worms in two minutes left yes see my fear if I debate them too much is inside it Sophia he's he'll build a terminator next though the question is where do you draw the line semantically between just automating something and AI as it seems to have gotten blurred a lot in no Irene I think that's an important question to me that's like asking where do you draw the line between the life form of the complex self-organizing molecule like it's a virus alive well we're not it's a retrovirus alive right I mean that's life is it's a word that people made up and then when you really dig into it it devolves into a bunch of properties right so I mean it's it's the same way here I mean what is intelligence actually mean I actually yeah even though it's in our my company name we try not to use the word AI I think that's something made up by a sci-fi writer somewhere I sort of look at machine learning and mathematical models how I like to do it you're optimizing a function language semantics natural language is ambiguous natural language terms just are just are ambiguous I mean this is part of why I introduced the distinction narrow AI and AGI artificial general intelligence because I didn't I didn't want to say that an AI that just plays chess for example or just like predicts the stock market time series I didn't want to say that's not like a real AI I mean it's it's doing something where if a human does that you consider it highly intelligent but but yet it's not able to understand the problem with solving in the broader context right it's true and the ability to solve a problem in the way that takes two brother contacts into account the ability to make a big leap a creative leap beyond anything you've seen before that did seem like something different than when the nonlinear curve fitting algorithm is which is why I started talking about AGI versus narrow AI but then then you get all kinds of borderline cases also you have like slightly narrow AI then you confront the Fatima's or not completely general-purpose either right we're highly biased to do some things but better than others but that's that's just part of the game that humanity plays right we invent concepts and then we break them and we invent new concepts and that's how knowledge progresses good answer fair enough and we're at a time so let's leave it at that but thank you so much well thank you for the good question

Channel: NexChange

Views: 3,521

Rating: 4.9223299 out of 5

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Id: UPbOlixZQxA

Length: 33min 22sec (2002 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 01 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/StoneQuirk]

What else could we expect with this man? Dude, he's Dr. Ben and he's developing a marketplace for AI that should work flawlessly.

[u/laminatedjesus]

Wow thanks for sharing. It seems the interviewer didn’t understand or care about the discussion from he start.

Great answers by Ben.

I look for great people or teams behinds projects. He fits the criteria.

[u/adalion13]

This video made me think that Dr. Ben is definitely a genius. Great interview and a great way to distinct AI with AGI.

[u/cyger]

It seems Dr. Noah Silverman is somewhat of a competitor to SGNet as he runs Helios.ai. Helios creates customized AI solutions for organizations that need them. I found Dr. Silverman tried be as dismissive about the need for blockchain, but Ben held himself up very well. It is clear Silverman doesn't understand SGNet deeply enough to understand it's power with blockchain; likely because he is highly biased against SGNet succeeding.

[u/PedroElMundo]

After watching this interview of Dr. Ben, I am now starting to admire the intellect of this man has. We can't compare it because he is so ideal to have it in his own.

[u/[deleted]]

Great interview. One question is indeed very pertinent: how do you control ownership over algorithms if AIs are trading them and might even become part of an AGI entity’s brain?

Edit: grammar