This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Artificial General Intelligence, AGI 2014, held in Quebec City, QC, Canada, in August 2014. The 22 papers and 8 posters were carefully reviewed and selected from 65 submissions. Researchers have recognized the necessity of returning to the original goals of the field by treating intelligence as a whole. Increasingly, there is a call for a transition back to confronting the more difficult issues of "human-level intelligence" and more broadly artificial general intelligence. AGI research differs from the ordinary AI research by stressing on the versatility and wholeness of intelligence and by carrying out the engineering practice according to an outline of a system comparable to the human mind in a certain sense. The AGI conference series has played and continues to play, a significant role in this resurgence of research on artificial intelligence in the deeper, original sense of the term of "artificial intelligence". The conferences encourage interdisciplinary research based on different understandings of intelligence and exploring different approaches.

Between Ape and Artilect is edited by noted AI researcher Ben Goertzel, and produced by futurist organization Humanity+. During 2010-12, Dr. Goertzel conducted a series of textual interviews with researchers in various areas of cutting-edge science -- artificial general intelligence, nanotechnology, life extension, neurotechnology, collective intelligence, mind uploading, body modification, neuro-spiritual transformation, and more. These interviews were published online in H+ Magazine, and are here gathered together in a single volume. The resulting series of dialogues treats a variety of social, futurological and scientific topics in a way that is accessible to the educated non-scientist, yet also deep and honest to the subtleties of the topics being discussed. Between Ape and Artilect is a must-read if you want the real views, opinions, ideas, muses and arguments of the people creating our future. Table of Contents Itamar Arel: AGI via Deep Learning Pei Wang: What Do You Mean by "AI"? Joscha Bach: Understanding the Mind Hugo DeGaris: Will There be Cyborgs? DeGaris Interviews Goertzel: Seeking the Sputnik of AGI Linas Vepstas: AGI, Open Source and Our Economic Future Joel Pitt: The Benefits of Open Source for AGI Randal Koene: Substrate-Independent Minds Joao Pedro de Magalhaes: Ending Aging Aubrey De Grey: Aging and AGI David Brin: Sousveillance J. Storrs Hall: Intelligent Nano Factories and Fogs Mohamad Tarifi: AGI and the Emerging Peer-to-Peer Economy Michael Anissimov: The Risks of Artificial Superintelligence Muehlhauser & Goertzel: Rationality, Risk, and the Future of AGI Paul Werbos: Will Humanity Survive? Wendell Wallach: Machine Morality Francis Heylighen: The Emerging Global Brain Steve Omohundro: The Wisdom of the Global Brain and the Future of AGI Alexandra Elbakyan: Beyond the Borg Giulio Prisco: Technological Transcendence Zhou Changle: Zen and the Art of Intelligent Robotics Hugo DeGaris: Is God an Alien Mathematician? Lincoln Cannon: The Most Transhumanist Religion? Natasha Vita-More: Upgrading Humanity Jeffery Martin & Mikey Siegel: Engineering Enlightenment

This book is a collection of writings by active researchers in the field of Artificial General Intelligence, on topics of central importance in the field. Each chapter focuses on one theoretical problem, proposes a novel solution, and is written in sufficiently non-technical language to be understandable by advanced undergraduates or scientists in allied fields. This book is the very first collection in the field of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) focusing on theoretical, conceptual, and philosophical issues in the creation of thinking machines. All the authors are researchers actively developing AGI projects, thus distinguishing the book from much of the theoretical cognitive science and AI literature, which is generally quite divorced from practical AGI system building issues. And the discussions are presented in a way that makes the problems and proposed solutions understandable to a wide readership of non-specialists, providing a distinction from the journal and conference-proceedings literature. The book will benefit AGI researchers and students by giving them a solid orientation in the conceptual foundations of the field (which is not currently available anywhere); and it would benefit researchers in allied fields by giving them a high-level view of the current state of thinking in the AGI field. Furthermore, by addressing key topics in the field in a coherent way, the collection as a whole may play an important role in guiding future research in both theoretical and practical AGI, and in linking AGI research with work in allied disciplines

The work outlines a detailed blueprint for the creation of an Artificial General Intelligence system with capability at the human level and ultimately beyond, according to the Cog Prime AGI design and the Open Cog software architecture.

The work outlines a novel conceptual and theoretical framework for understanding Artificial General Intelligence and based on this framework outlines a practical roadmap for the development of AGI with capability at the human level and ultimately beyond.

Best of H+ Magazine, Vol. 1 is edited by counterculture legend R.U. Sirius, and brought to you by futurist organization Humanity+. It is our great privilege to live in an era when H+ - the extension of humanity beyond its traditional biological form - is not merely fantasy but a reasonable description of the practical, everyday unfolding of science and technology. H+ Magazine has provided a venue for edgy, creative thinking about H+ technologies and ideas since it was founded in 2008. This volume collects some of the best H+ Magazine articles from the magazine's first few years, when it was edited by legendary futurist R.U. Sirius.
Table of Contents Preface by Ben Goertzel Preface by R.U. Sirius The Rise of the Citizen Scientist Why DIY Bio? Re-Engineering the Human Immune System Self Tracking: The Quantified Life is Worth Living From Hackerspace to Your Garage Scrapheap Transhumanism DIY RFID Radically Enhanced Human Body Our Machines/Ourselves: AI/Bots/The Singularity Ray Kurzweil: The H+ Interview Brain on a Chip: A Roundup of Projects Working on Silicon Intelligence The Chinese Singularity Build an Optimal Scientist, Then Retire Here Come the Neurobots: Brain Bots are Developing Personalities - and a Whole Lot More Can "Terminators" Actually Be Our Salvation Chronic Citizen: Jonathan Lethem on P.K. Dick Isn't It Time for Cinematic Sci-Fi Television? Let a Hundred Futures Bloom The Reluctant Transhumanist Was Michael Jackson a Transhumanist? Gene Genies: BIO Adventures in Synthetic Biology: Interview with Stanford's Drew Endy Eight Ways In-Vitro Meat Will Change Our Lives One Atom at a Time: Nano How Close Are We to Real Nanotechnology? Targeting Cancer Cells with Nanoparticles Engineering an End to Aging Smart Biology to the Rescue I Am Ironman : HAL (Hybrid Assistive Limb) Cybernetic Suit My New Sense Organ Sports Enhancement and Life Enhancement: Different Rules Apply Botox Parties, Michael Jackson, and the Disillusioned Transhumanist This is Your Brain on Neurotechnology Optogenetics: The Edge of Neural Control Cognitive Commodities in the Neuro Marketplace Will We Eventually Upload Our Minds? Transhumanism at Play Gamification: Turning Work Into Play The Perils of FDS Fun Deficiency Syndrome The Pursuit of Crappiness

The general problem addressed in this book is a large and important one: how to usefully deal with huge storehouses of complex information about real-world situations. Every one of the major modes of interacting with such storehouses - querying, data mining, data analysis - is addressed by current technologies only in very limited and unsatisfactory ways. The impact of a solution to this problem would be huge and pervasive, as the domains of human pursuit to which such storehouses are acutely relevant is numerous and rapidly growing. Finally, we give a more detailed treatment of one potential solution with this class, based on our prior work with the Probabilistic Logic Networks (PLN) formalism. We show how PLN can be used to carry out realworld reasoning, by means of a number of practical examples of reasoning regarding human activities inreal-world situations.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Artificial General Intelligence, AGI 2012, held in Oxford, UK, in December 2012. The 34 revised full papers presented together with 4 invited keynote lectures were carefully reviewed and selected from 80 submissions. The papers are written by leading scientists involved in research and development of AI systems possessing general intelligence at the human level and beyond; with a special focus on humanoid robotics and AGI, cognitive robotics, creativity and AGI, the future evolution of advanced AGIs, and the dynamics of AGI goal systems.

Creating Internet Intelligence is an interdisciplinary treatise exploring the hypothesis that global computer and communication networks will one day evolve into an autonomous intelligent system, and making specific recommendations as to what engineers and scientists can do today to encourage and shape this evolution. A general theory of intelligent systems is described, based on the author's previous work; and in this context, the specific notion of Internet intelligence is fleshed out, in its commercial, social, psychological, computer-science, philosophical, and theological aspects. Software engineering work carried out by the author and his team over the last few years, aimed at seeding the emergence of Internet intelligence, is reviewed in some detail, including the Webmind AI Engine, a uniquely powerful Internet-based digital intelligence, and the Webworld platform for peer-to-peer distributed cognition and artificial life. The book should be of interest to computer scientists, philosophers, and social scientists, and more generally to anyone concerned about the nature of the mind, or the evolution of computer and Internet technology and its effect on human life.

Cybernetic pioneer Warren McCullough asked: "What is a man, that he may know a number; and what is a number, that a man may know it?" Thinking along much the same lines, my question here is: "What is a creative mind, that it might emerge from a complex system; and what is a complex system, that it might give rise to a creative mind?" Complexity science is a fashionable topic these days. My perspective on complexity, however, is a somewhat unusual one: I am interested in complex systems science principally as it reflects on abstract mathematical, computational models of mind. In my three previous books, The Structure of Intelligence, Evolving Mind, and Chaotic Logic, I have outlined a comprehensive complex-systems-theoretic theory of mind that I now call the psynet model. This book is a continuation of the research program presented in my previous books (and those books will be frequently referred to here, by the nicknames EM and CL). One might summarize the trajectory of thought spanning these four books as follows. SI formulated a philosophy and mathem- ics of mind, based on theoretical computer science and the concept of "pattern. " EM analyzed the theory of evolution by natural selection in similar terms, and used this computational theory of evolution to establish the evolutionary nature of thought.

This book is a collection of writings by active researchers in the field of Artificial General Intelligence, on topics of central importance in the field. Each chapter focuses on one theoretical problem, proposes a novel solution, and is written in sufficiently non-technical language to be understandable by advanced undergraduates or scientists in allied fields. This book is the very first collection in the field of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) focusing on theoretical, conceptual, and philosophical issues in the creation of thinking machines. All the authors are researchers actively developing AGI projects, thus distinguishing the book from much of the theoretical cognitive science and AI literature, which is generally quite divorced from practical AGI system building issues. And the discussions are presented in a way that makes the problems and proposed solutions understandable to a wide readership of non-specialists, providing a distinction from the journal and conference-proceedings literature. The book will benefit AGI researchers and students by giving them a solid orientation in the conceptual foundations of the field (which is not currently available anywhere); and it would benefit researchers in allied fields by giving them a high-level view of the current state of thinking in the AGI field. Furthermore, by addressing key topics in the field in a coherent way, the collection as a whole may play an important role in guiding future research in both theoretical and practical AGI, and in linking AGI research with work in allied disciplines

This book summarizes a network of interrelated ideas which I have developed, off and on, over the past eight or ten years. The underlying theme is the psychological interplay of order and chaos. Or, to put it another way, the interplay of deduction and induction. I will try to explain the relationship between logical, orderly, conscious, rule-following reason and fluid, self organizing, habit-governed, unconscious, chaos-infused intuition. My previous two books, The Structure of Intelligence and The Evolving Mind, briefly touched on this relationship. But these books were primarily concerned with other matters: SI with constructing a formal language for discussing mentality and its mechanization, and EM with exploring the role of evolution in thought. They danced around the edges of the order/chaos problem, without ever fully entering into it. My goal in writing this book was to go directly to the core of mental process, "where angels fear to tread" -- to tackle all the sticky issues which it is considered prudent to avoid: the nature of consciousness, the relation between mind and reality, the justification of belief systems, the connection between creativity and mental illness, .... All of these issues are dealt with here in a straightforward and unified way, using a combination of concepts from my previous work with ideas from chaos theory and complex systems science."

Abstract In this chapter we provide an overview of probabilistic logic networks (PLN), including our motivations for developing PLN and the guiding principles underlying PLN. We discuss foundational choices we made, introduce PLN knowledge representation, and briefly introduce inference rules and truth-values. We also place PLN in context with other approaches to uncertain inference. 1.1 Motivations This book presents Probabilistic Logic Networks (PLN), a systematic and pragmatic framework for computationally carrying out uncertain reasoning - r- soning about uncertain data, and/or reasoning involving uncertain conclusions. We begin with a few comments about why we believe this is such an interesting and important domain of investigation. First of all, we hold to a philosophical perspective in which "reasoning" - properly understood - plays a central role in cognitive activity. We realize that other perspectives exist; in particular, logical reasoning is sometimes construed as a special kind of cognition that humans carry out only occasionally, as a deviation from their usual (intuitive, emotional, pragmatic, sensorimotor, etc.) modes of thought. However, we consider this alternative view to be valid only according to a very limited definition of "logic." Construed properly, we suggest, logical reasoning may be understood as the basic framework underlying all forms of cognition, including those conventionally thought of as illogical and irrational.

The term Cosmism was introduced by Tsiolokovsky and other Russian Cosmists around 1900. Goertzel's "Cosmist Manifesto" gives it new life and a new twist for the 21st century. Cosmism, as Goertzel presents it, is a practical philosophy for the posthuman era. Rooted in Western and Eastern philosophy as well as modern technology and science, it is a way of understanding ourselves and our universe that makes sense now, and will keep on making sense as advanced technology exerts its transformative impact as the future unfolds. Among the many topics considered are AI, nanotechnology, uploading, immortality, psychedelics, meditation, future social structures, psi phenomena, alien and cetacean intelligence and the Singularity. The Cosmist perspective is shown to make plain old common sense of even the wildest future possibilities.

"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.

Abstract In this chapter we provide an overview of probabilistic logic networks (PLN), including our motivations for developing PLN and the guiding principles underlying PLN. We discuss foundational choices we made, introduce PLN knowledge representation, and briefly introduce inference rules and truth-values. We also place PLN in context with other approaches to uncertain inference. 1.1 Motivations This book presents Probabilistic Logic Networks (PLN), a systematic and pragmatic framework for computationally carrying out uncertain reasoning - r- soning about uncertain data, and/or reasoning involving uncertain conclusions. We begin with a few comments about why we believe this is such an interesting and important domain of investigation. First of all, we hold to a philosophical perspective in which "reasoning" - properly understood - plays a central role in cognitive activity. We realize that other perspectives exist; in particular, logical reasoning is sometimes construed as a special kind of cognition that humans carry out only occasionally, as a deviation from their usual (intuitive, emotional, pragmatic, sensorimotor, etc.) modes of thought. However, we consider this alternative view to be valid only according to a very limited definition of "logic." Construed properly, we suggest, logical reasoning may be understood as the basic framework underlying all forms of cognition, including those conventionally thought of as illogical and irrational.

Adopting a wildly poetic style oscillating transchaotically between SF, prose poetry and avant-garde literature, "Echoes" explores the life and mind of an crazed AI researcher in a near-future world, as he indulges in excesses of sex, drugs, metaphysical and cognitive philosophy, and communication with elusive microscopic aliens. Does his superintelligent AI come close to destroying the world, or only his mind? Only the Psychedelic McBuddha Machine knows for sure.

The Hidden Pattern presents a novel philosophy of mind, intended to form a coherent conceptual framework within which it is possible to understand the diverse aspects of mind and intelligence in a unified way. The central concept of the philosophy presented is the concept of "pattern": minds and the world they live in and co-create are viewed as patterned systems of patterns, evolving over time, and various aspects of subjective experience and individual and social intelligence are analyzed in detail in this light. Many of the ideas presented are motivated by recent research in artificial intelligence and cognitive science, and the author's own AI research is discussed in moderate detail in one chapter. However, the scope of the book is broader than this, incorporating insights from sources as diverse as Vedantic philosophy, psychedelic psychotherapy, Nietzschean and Peircean metaphysics and quantum theory. One of the unique aspects of the patternist approach is the way it seamlessly fuses the mechanistic, engineering-oriented approach to intelligence and the introspective, experiential approach to intelligence.

Creating Internet Intelligence is an interdisciplinary treatise exploring the hypothesis that global computer and communication networks will one day evolve into an autonomous intelligent system, and making specific recommendations as to what engineers and scientists can do today to encourage and shape this evolution. A general theory of intelligent systems is described, based on the author's previous work; and in this context, the specific notion of Internet intelligence is fleshed out, in its commercial, social, psychological, computer-science, philosophical, and theological aspects. Software engineering work carried out by the author and his team over the last few years, aimed at seeding the emergence of Internet intelligence, is reviewed in some detail, including the Webmind AI Engine, a uniquely powerful Internet-based digital intelligence, and the Webworld platform for peer-to-peer distributed cognition and artificial life. The book should be of interest to computer scientists, philosophers, and social scientists, and more generally to anyone concerned about the nature of the mind, or the evolution of computer and Internet technology and its effect on human life.

Cybernetic pioneer Warren McCullough asked: "What is a man, that he may know a number; and what is a number, that a man may know it?" Thinking along much the same lines, my question here is: "What is a creative mind, that it might emerge from a complex system; and what is a complex system, that it might give rise to a creative mind?" Complexity science is a fashionable topic these days. My perspective on complexity, however, is a somewhat unusual one: I am interested in complex systems science principally as it reflects on abstract mathematical, computational models of mind. In my three previous books, The Structure of Intelligence, Evolving Mind, and Chaotic Logic, I have outlined a comprehensive complex-systems-theoretic theory of mind that I now call the psynet model. This book is a continuation of the research program presented in my previous books (and those books will be frequently referred to here, by the nicknames EM and CL). One might summarize the trajectory of thought spanning these four books as follows. SI formulated a philosophy and mathem- ics of mind, based on theoretical computer science and the concept of "pattern. " EM analyzed the theory of evolution by natural selection in similar terms, and used this computational theory of evolution to establish the evolutionary nature of thought.

This book summarizes a network of interrelated ideas which I have developed, off and on, over the past eight or ten years. The underlying theme is the psychological interplay of order and chaos. Or, to put it another way, the interplay of deduction and induction. I will try to explain the relationship between logical, orderly, conscious, rule-following reason and fluid, self organizing, habit-governed, unconscious, chaos-infused intuition. My previous two books, The Structure of Intelligence and The Evolving Mind, briefly touched on this relationship. But these books were primarily concerned with other matters: SI with constructing a formal language for discussing mentality and its mechanization, and EM with exploring the role of evolution in thought. They danced around the edges of the order/chaos problem, without ever fully entering into it. My goal in writing this book was to go directly to the core of mental process, "where angels fear to tread" -- to tackle all the sticky issues which it is considered prudent to avoid: the nature of consciousness, the relation between mind and reality, the justification of belief systems, the connection between creativity and mental illness, .... All of these issues are dealt with here in a straightforward and unified way, using a combination of concepts from my previous work with ideas from chaos theory and complex systems science."

0. 0 Psychology versus Complex Systems Science Over the last century, psychology has become much less of an art and much more of a science. Philosophical speculation is out; data collection is in. In many ways this has been a very positive trend. Cognitive science (Mandler, 1985) has given us scientific analyses of a variety of intelligent behaviors: short-term memory, language processing, vision processing, etc. And thanks to molecular psychology (Franklin, 1985), we now have a rudimentary understanding of the chemical processes underlying personality and mental illness. However, there is a growing feeling-particularly among non-psychologists (see e. g. Sommerhoff, 1990) - that, with the new emphasis on data collection, something important has been lost. Very little attention is paid to the question of how it all fits together. The early psychologists, and the classical philosophers of mind, were concerned with the general nature of mentality as much as with the mechanisms underlying specific phenomena. But the new, scientific psychology has made disappointingly little progress toward the resolution of these more general questions. One way to deal with this complaint is to dismiss the questions themselves. After all, one might argue, a scientific psychology cannot be expected to deal with fuzzy philosophical questions that probably have little empirical signifi cance. It is interesting that behaviorists and cognitive scientists tend to be in agreement regarding the question of the overall structure of the mind."

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Artificial General Intelligence, AGI 2022, held as a hybrid event in Seattle, WA, USA, in August 2022.The 31 full papers presented in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 61 submissions. The papers cover topics from foundations of AGI, to AGI approaches and AGI ethics, to the roles of systems biology, goal generation, and learning systems, and so much more. Additionally, this volume contains 13 posters.