 The underlying goal is to catalyze the emergence of beneficial general intelligence. And this just has a bunch of different aspects. Making a decentralized AI platform that's owned by everyone and no one, and can't be controlled by the power elite is one aspect. Making compassionate, loving robots that can be meditation assistants, elder care workers, teachers, and carry out other good works in the world. This is another piece of it. The use of our AI technology to try to cure aging and disease by analyzing genomic and medical data. It's a lot of different projects, but actually they're all connected together in a common core. Boom, what's up everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host Alan Sakyan. We are at the Transformative Technology Conference. It is fantastic here. There's so many diverse, brilliant minds. We are now sitting down with Dr. Ben Gertz. Hello. Pleasure to be here. Thank you for coming on to the show. Really appreciate it. And Ben is known as one of the world's leading AI scientists. SingularityNet, Hansen Robotics, Decentralized AI Foundation now, Alliance. You're working on so many other projects. And he has four kids, which is nuts. However he ends up doing this is crazy to me. I don't know yet. We'll have to figure it out. Before we get to all the epicness of the projects that you're working on, how did you become who you are? Where were you born? How did you pick up your interests? Tell us about that. Well, I was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to American parents. My dad was there doing his sociology, PhD work on Brazilian student politics. And when I was pretty young, we moved back to the U.S., to Eugene, Oregon. So I sort of grew up among the crazy hippies of Eugene in the late 60s and early 70s, which probably left a mark on me. My dad was a Marxist sociologist at that point. My mom was very involved in anti-war protest movement and then the women's rights movement, civil rights movement, all these things. So I sort of grew up in this social change type of ambiance. My grandfather, my mother's father, was a physical chemist. So he taught me a lot about science and sort of sparked that interest in me. His sister was a physicist also. And so from an early age I had an interest both in advanced science and in changing the world for the better. And I got interested in science fiction very young from watching the original Star Trek with my dad. And that's where I first got the idea of AI. It was a little robot in the original Star Trek, which was like zooming through the galaxy. And then Kirk and Spock had to deactivate it by presenting it with logical paradoxes. And I thought that made no sense. I was like three or four years old. I'm like, if this AI is so smart, how can it be full about these childish paradoxes? But it piqued my interest. I started reading science fiction. Sometime around 73 or so I encountered a book by Gerald Funberg, a physicist called The Prometheus Project. And he said within a few decades, humanity is going to create superhuman AI, molecular nanotechnology, and human immortality. And then the choice will be whether we develop this purely for materialistic purposes or for spiritual advancement. I was maybe seven, eight years old. I read this book in the local library. I'm like, well, that's interesting. Why isn't anyone talking about this? And so then I became more interested in AI and psychology and Buddhism and time travel, life extension, biology, physics, all sorts of things. And eventually in my late 20s, I got a math PhD. I graduated college when I was 18. Got a math PhD at 22. And shortly after that, started working on AI. And quickly realized that it was a big job to build a general intelligence, but seemed like a feasible and possible thing to do. And started pushing on that, started trying to build AI systems with potential for general intelligence in the mid-90s. Had an AI startup in New York in the late 90s, which sort of rose and fell with the dot-com bubble, was in DC doing AI consulting for companies and government agencies from its 2002 through 2011. And all the while sort of developing my ideas on how to build general intelligence further and further, as well as doing research in a whole bunch of different areas that we probably won't talk about today, like life extension biology and the science of the paranormal and lots of weird stuff. And is that with OpenCog? OpenCog has been a project since 2008. So there's been a series of AI systems I've worked on, which had sort of common principles, but each one advanced further and further. So between 97 and 2001, we had an AI system called WebMind. And then in 2001, we started a company called Novamente, which is an AI consulting company. And we built a system called Novamente Cognition Engine. In 2008, we opened source pieces of that to form OpenCog. So OpenCog formally started in 2008, but it was built on some software ideas that have been developed a long time before that. So we've been trying to gradually work toward artificial general intelligence for quite some time. And then, of course, I moved to Hong Kong in 2011. And why did you make that move? I fell in love with the Chinese woman, basically. Yes, that's it. It was kind of a crux of it. That's it, yeah. Well, that's the real crux of it. But a lot of other things fell into place also. I mean, I got... The reason I started going to Asia is in 2007, my friend Curzio Vasapoyo drew me an economic chart proving to me that the US was going to go bankrupt on September 25, 2008, which was right around the time Lehman Brothers went broke, right? So we sort of had the idea that there was going to be a financial crisis. So I started getting some contracts to do AI for companies in Japan. We're talking to a Korean university friend of mine. Wow, you were working your anti-fragility in advance. Yeah, yeah. That's so cool. I started looking at some Chinese universities. Now on this tour around China, two things happened. I met Rui Ting, who's now my wife in Shaman, China, where she was doing her PhD, and I met a guy named Gino Yu in Hong Kong. We applied for a research grant together and got a research grant in Hong Kong, Pali Yu, for some open cog research aimed at video game characters and robots. So there's a woman and then there's a research grant. Sure, yeah. And on the other hand, my kids, who I'd been raising in Washington D.C., were growing up and going away to college. So it was sort of a time when it was convenient to make a move. And I was also getting a bit worn out on the U.S. military intelligence industry, which I mean, at that time was sort of the best and almost the only way to get paid as an independent AI researcher. And I mean, I'm grateful for having had work to do for Northrop Grammar and SAIC and so forth, ultimately for government clients. I mean, it paid my bills. It let me support an AI team in Brazil while doing some AGI R&D. But around that same time, the AI ecosystem was developing further. It was becoming possible to make a living doing AI for things other than military and intelligence. And so I moved to Hong Kong. Which your parents would be like. Let's get away from it. I mean, it was mostly good-hearted, well-meaning people in D.C. that I worked with who really felt like they're protecting the world from bad things. And they are protecting the world from a lot of bad things. So there's an amazing number of nasty things that almost happen and are averted by intelligence agencies. Which is when people say, oh, the military budget is so big. And I'm like, but there's a lot of things that we're safe here because of that. There's a lot of things I didn't agree with there. Totally. But there's also a lot of good that was done. And I mean, the world is a complicated place. But on the whole, I'm happier now not working on that. Right? And so in Hong Kong, I did a bunch of things. I did a machine learning-based hedge fund. I did this research with Gino. And then I had a good friend named David Hanson who was in Texas doing humanoid robotics. I introduced it to some people in Hong Kong who ultimately got him funding for his company. He moved to Hong Kong and brought Hanson robots to Hong Kong, which is a beautiful place to do robotics because across the border in Shenzhen, you have the world's hotbed of consumer electronics manufacturing and hardware generally. So I became chief scientist of Hanson Robotics. Love it. And at that time, David was creating the original Sophia robot. He had a bunch of other cool robots before that. Give us a time. Stampus is 20. Sophia was launched in 2015. I think the original sculpture might have been 2014. Okay. At that time, he had some other robots. We were experimenting with first Robot Einstein and Philip K. Dick and Bina48 and so forth. So then we decided it would be interesting to use the open cog engine as sort of a beefed up control system for the Hanson robots. And we started working on that in 2014. And now as of the last month, we're starting to really use open cog within the Hanson robots in public appearances and so forth. It was a bit of a journey to get there just because we'd never used open cog for a real time control thing before. We'd used it to analyze genetics data or to analyze stock market data for the stock market. We'd used it for research and advanced machine reasoning. Controlling the robots was the first time we'd used the open cog AI system to control a real time system, which required a lot of changes. And David and I had a lot of common interests. I'm a common interest in the benevolent singularity in Philip K. Dick. We also had a common interest in making a robot mind cloud, like a cloud based framework for storing the knowledge of many, many different AIs and robots so they could all share information. Which became singularity. Yeah, yeah, and that grew into singularity. I mean, we could see that, you know, Ethereum based smart contracts and the blockchain and quantum computing should all feed into this. And then I met Simone Giacomelli, a young blockchain guru from Italy due to David Hanson basically introducing me to a friend of Simone's who then brought Simone to Hong Kong. And when Simone and I met, we immediately saw how to create the singularity net. That was May 2017. Then we raised some seed funding for that in July 2017. And then did a whole bunch of publicity and software development and concept refinement. Did a token generation event, token sale in December 2017. And now basically that's been going full speed ahead. We're launching the beta of the Singularity Net, you know, blockchain based decentralized AI mind cloud project in February of next year. And we're now, we're doing a spin off of Singularity Net called Singularity Studio aimed at basically building enterprise software applications for pharma, fintech, IoT and so on, leveraging the Singularity Net platform. So this is now exploding in all different directions. I mean, the underlying goal is to catalyze the emergence of beneficial general intelligence. And this just has a bunch of different aspects, making a decentralized AI platform that's owned by everyone and no one and can't be controlled by the power elite is one aspect. Making compassionate, loving robots that can be meditation assistants, you know, elder care workers, teachers and carry out other good works in the world. This is another piece of it. The use of our AI technology to try to cure aging and disease by analyzing genomic and medical data. That's another aspect of it. I mean, I started doing cloud based machine learning for longevity genomics in 2003 before it was possible, before it was popular rather. And you know, now we're progressing much further with that. So it's a lot of different projects, but actually they're all connected together in a common core. Totally. Okay, so I love it because this is what I care about so much and what a lot of people really care about in the field of being really proper, adequate, loving, caring stewards for Earth. So we have a general intelligence, a benevolent one that nobody owns, but people are able to access and contribute to. And then we have a benevolent robotics, loving, caring robots that can help society move forward. And then also just understanding all of this beautiful data within our bodies and then increasing our longevity, really staying healthy longer. So these things are just, I love it. I love it. I'm so happy you're doing it. I can't believe you're able to balance all of this stuff. And also when you first started talking about you being a kid, I was, you know, I don't really know that many people when they're like, you know, when they're three and seven, when they're starting to really unpack these really interesting, I guess, ways of seeing the future that excite them at that young of an age. So I would also really like to see more young kids have that sense of youthful inspiration that you had that catalyzed you to finish your PhD when you're 22 and start companies and build the future. So, okay, I guess let's start by asking you about the convergence of all of this is fascinating. It's multidisciplinary. A lot of people see it that way, that it's so nuanced and intricate, multivariate. So how do you figure out where these things overlap and how to, because, you know, you know way more about AI and machine learning than of course me and even a lot of people that even, that are even in the field. How do you know where to allocate resources for like how things overlap and so you don't have to build it twice? Well I think I tend to have a fairly abstract point of view on things. I mean my PhD was in math and I always tended to philosophy of mind and metaphysics and so forth. So I tend to look at the more abstract patterns binding everything together and so from that point of view these things that appear different are not that different. I mean the AI system and then the economy in which singularity acts on the human body. I mean these are all complex self-organizing pattern systems and if you look at things in this more abstract sort of pattern dynamics point of view then the commonality is even more apparent than the differences and of course computer science supports that. It can be the same data structures and algorithms dealing with all these things. I mean of course to do real things in the real world there's endless amounts of nitty-gritty issues and compromises that need to be made because even though these systems are in some sense of common organizing principles and dynamics I mean if you're doing bioinformatics you know you need to hire people to know the nitty-gritty molecular biology if you're doing robotics I mean you need people who are good at connecting the anchor from the motor to the inside of the robot's face. So the biggest sort of leap I made in my life probably was from being a theorist trying to understand everything to trying to build stuff and do stuff which rapidly verged into leading teams building stuff and doing stuff because theory you can do as one guy just sitting there thinking and coming up with one idea after another but at the level of complexity of modern technology there's only so far one guy can go in programming a complex system or building a piece of hardware or analyzing a biology system. So that was entrepreneurship. It was a big leap from theory into entrepreneurship and sort of technology leadership and that probably has not increased my overall happiness level I would say. So you want it interesting and tell us about that. But it has been exciting you know I mean and it's very interesting you're making real stuff and of course there's a level of understanding you only get by engaging in making real stuff that you'll just never get by sitting and theorizing. I mean not to minimize the value of what you get by sitting and theorizing. I mean I love the philosophy of Kant and Nietzsche and all these guys who sat and thought and went down a certain intellectual rabbit hole as far as it can possibly go right? That's really cool. On the other hand by engaging in groups of people and by engaging in the physical world with complex technologies I mean you certainly gain a different sort of understanding of things so it's been super interesting. But I would say I keep saying after another one or two more years of this I'm going to take a step back and focus on theory and pure research again but it keeps not happening because there's more and more interesting and amazing stuff to build right? Yes. It's cool how you go through heavy theory, heavy entrepreneurship back to looking to do heavy theory. I'm still doing both but I do theory in odd moments here and there and that is a limitation because sometimes you just need to spend like a few months, like 15 hours a day bearing down on some conceptual thing and I don't have time for that right now while running these different projects but that's I mean I can't complain because these are all really amazing things so I mean maybe within a couple years there's enough stable management in place for the various projects I'm doing that I can step back and spend like two thirds of my time on theory again or something. And one of the biggest keys for you then is to find people that can do the work as well as you can or as close to as well. A lot of people who are much better than me. Even better. A lot of people. I mean we have loads of amazing software engineers and my programming skill has degenerated since I've been doing other things for so long and of course in biology we have people who have just comprehensive knowledge of the human body at all different levels whereas I know a decent amount of biology but I'm not at that level and of course David Hansen and his team not only have more technical knowledge of robotics, David has this amazing artistic flair for creating systems that can connect to people right and that's been a really interesting thing so I saw how some people were just connecting to this Sophia robot on an intuitive almost animal level and I mean that's where I thought well let's try having her be a meditation guide or something because it seems like can we leverage this spooky connection that some people feel to the robot to grab people and then push them in the direction of positive growth and consciousness expansion right but I would never have thought of that if not for engaging with David Hansen and his technology which is based on his background in film and arts and narrative and a whole different part of the universe than the things that I was used to Now how does when you're talking about this abstract thinking that I love so much to, it's multidisciplinary it's calculating a lot, it's synthesizing calculating, analyzing, synthesizing information I love that style of thinking then to take that and then go and build something practical into the world that brings value There are a lot of intervening steps actually Tell us about the other things That's a challenge, I think the approach we took with OpenCog was sort of like having a high level theory of how a mind should work to have human like intelligence within restricted computational resources and then sort of going bottom up saying what could I build using available data structures and algorithms that would then satisfy the constraints of this high level theory So it wasn't so much that we started from the high level theory and built down, which I tried but didn't get anywhere or didn't get far enough If you start with a high level theory then you try to design up but you're constrained by matching with a high level theory So you're sort of going in a way bottom up and top down at the same time And I think in biology it's sort of the same way like to combat aging you need a systems understanding of aging and now things are going wrong in different parts of the body different levels of the body, how the different systems are interacting but then if you're designing a therapy you're probably still poking like a small number of genes or molecules but you want to poke that small number of genes or molecules in a way that fits in with the high level understanding that you have and if you don't do that you're just going to make a localized remedy rather than really help So for example, you can look at aging it like the extracellular matrix the molecules in between the cells and the body in between the organs this gets stiffer as you get older and older and from a systems you can see this is very important because this is where signaling happens in different parts of the body the contours of the extracellular matrix correlate with acupuncture pathways so there's a lot of systems understanding that tells you why the ECM is important but then if you want to fix that then what do you do? Well, okay, why does it get stiff? There's these cross-linked proteins for example there's glucosapane molecules so we're working with Christian Schaffmeister a temple university to design like another technology based molecular scissors that have spiraligomer molecules to cut the cross-linked glucosapane molecules so there you're starting with Christians nanotechnology like what can you do with it which will be valuable in the context of this systems model of aging so you got to start with the whole system and start with what your particular tools can do and find the middle ground where they meet That thought process is actually extremely important a lot of people come in with a vision for how they want to change the world and then I'm always like amazing vision like what are the short-term steps to get there and then it's also important to see how does the vision meet the short-term steps in the middle that's really cool Ben, I like that a lot run us through right now there seems to be a lot of artificial intelligence that is coming into the world and how does one accumulate that into the general intelligence singularity net and then how do people access the general intelligence how do they apply it to their practices Yeah this is a complex story unsurprisingly so I mean we can really look at what we're making is a I guess a network of networks of networks in a way but of course human life is that the brain is a network embedded in the larger network of the body embedded in the larger network of society embedded in the larger network of the ecosystem so AI has multiple levels like that also so I have the open cog system whose knowledge representation is a network a weighted labeled hypergraph and there's multiple AI algorithms acting on this common knowledge graph such as some neural nets for pattern recognition a logic engine to do with abstract knowledge and reasoning evolutionary learning which evolves and creates new things and these all act together on this common knowledge graph which then has a goal system associated with it and can try to choose actions that it thinks will help achieve its goals given the current context where the understanding of the context and the actions is given by all the knowledge in this graph right so that's open cog which in itself is very complicated and we worked on it for a long time and which I think is quite good at generalization and abstraction we're still working on optimizing it but I think the core is there the singularity net is a platform in which multiple AIs maybe based on quite different principles can be networked together so they can all talk to each other they can all communicate share data with each other so these AIs can provide services to outside users they can be used in the back end of various software products and websites but the AIs can also outsource services to each other in complex patterns and so that's another level of network right so I think you need some AIs in there that have a fundamental power of generalization and abstraction like open cog does but this can then work together with simpler types of AIs to coordinate together into a network whose intelligence in a way is greater than the sum of the parts so you can look at that sort of like how different organs in the body are networked together and they each have their own intelligence but the whole obviously has more coordinated behavior than the sum of the parts as well then we're also working on something called the DIA the Decentralized AI Alliance and that's an alliance of different decentralized AI projects so SingularityNet is ours which networks together open cog with a bunch of other AIs but then there are other projects like Ocean Protocol which is a blockchain based decentralized data network there's Shivam which is a decentralized network for genomics based AI there's Deep Brain Chain which uses blockchain for fast training of deep neural networks across many machines so we want to network together these different decentralized AI networks into a sort of network of networks so that's why we have a network of networks and all these levels it's complicated but that's what we see in nature and I think in different ways that's what we see on the internet already so I think that's the right way to think about it that doesn't mean you don't need core generalization and abstract reasoning algorithms in there and in some ways you could say these are the crux of it for AGI but all the other parts are important too I mean just as in your cortex there's certain micro-circuits that are really good at abstract learning and reasoning but if you just put these micro-circuits in a vat they're just going to abstractly reason about their own abstract reasoning in sort of vacuous loops it's by putting them in the network of the brain which is the network of the body of the society of the ecosystem that you're getting you're really giving these abstract learning circuits the ability to prove their worth yes, yes okay I liked how you were describing it it finally started coming together more for me and I like that and hopefully for others as well okay now when you feed a when you're feeding open cog which has the ability to abstractly reason when you're feeding it a to-do of some sort how does it parse that and make sense of what it needs to do within its framework to bring about the result open cog can ingest a lot of different types of knowledge so I mean there's a language parser where it parses out English language now into nodes and links to try to represent the semantics of that English language it doesn't always work but sometimes it does and you can also take computer programs like little list programs or something and import those and then they turn into nodes and links and it's knowledge base we also have specialized data importers for types of biology knowledge for example or accounting knowledge and so forth when you import the data it goes into the whole and it's organized into buckets, nodes, areas not buckets it's organized into nodes and links which all connect to each other so not never the buckets no it's not partition but then there's the reasoning engine looks at the nodes and links that came from data including vision and hearing as well as databases and language and the reasoning engine takes those nodes and links that came from the outside world and builds new nodes and links and that's how you add to it and then reasoning does is takes empirical knowledge and then generates new knowledge based on the empirical knowledge and then when you're adding the knowledge and then you're trying to get an answer of sorts from that how does it compute there's a tool called the pattern matcher in OpenCog so if you want to find a collection of nodes and links matching a certain pattern you submit a query and it searches the whole knowledge base to find things matching that pattern and then there's the logical backward chainer which if you give a pattern it tries to find things that approximately or probabilistically match that pattern and so if you're asking a question somewhere or another that question is turned into a crisp or probabilistic pattern matching query that goes against that whole knowledge base okay and then now we're getting pretty deep in the weeds that's really important adding the knowledge making the query and then getting some sort of results and this is what I want to do a little bit is the roots is the deep roots and then also then I see the OpenCog with the SingularityNet able to work with the different AIs yeah so I mean if someone makes a great AI for say recognizing patterns in videos or say for importing data from accounting spreadsheets or something you want an easy way for that to feed knowledge into an abstraction engine like OpenCog and so SingularityNet makes an easy way for different AIs and by all sorts of different people to connect together and if someone else makes a different reasoning engine with different strengths and weaknesses relative to OpenCog that can be there in the SingularityNet also then some application could consult two different reasoning engines and decide which answer it likes better or one of the reasoning engines if it gets stuck halfway through doing reasoning it could ask a question of a different reasoning engine it could help it get unstuck right with the potential to having different AIs able to compete with and consult each other within a common network Interesting compete and consult with each other in the AI networks interesting and then the decentralized AI alliance gets in there as well so this is more new this is your newest that's new we announced that a few months ago but we're still forming it I mean the idea there so projects are using blockchain related technologies to make decentralized AI networks that are owned by the participants and democratically controlled and they have different focuses so I mean SingularityNet is a pretty generic framework for interconnecting AI is now deep brain chain for example is a decentralized network that is really fast at training deep neural nets and Shivam is a decentralized AI network that's specifically gathered from the genomic data from people stores it securely and then does some analytics on the genomics data right so we don't need to replicate everything they're doing we just let an agent a node in the SingularityNet talk directly to a node in the Shivam network or deep brain chain so if a SingularityNet needs some neural net strain really fast it may outsource that to deep brain chain if a SingularityNet is analyzing genomics data and wants more genomics data ask the Shivam blockchain hey do you have any data filling these criteria that I could use and then the AGI token which is within the SingularityNet ecosystem can be automatically converted on the back end into a Shivam token to pay for that and then of course if you have reputation and rating like if one guy has written a bunch of great AI in SingularityNet he has like a 4.5 star rating then if he starts to do something in Shivam he should get a high rating by propagation from SingularityNet so you can have both sharing of data sharing of currency and sharing of reputation and ratings among different decentralized blockchain based AI related networks and I think this is how you can build an alternate AI ecosystem that can really take on the tech giants whoa that last part yeah there's a lot to be done and it's not just building the tech it's coordinating a lot of people with different philosophies and incentives also yeah that's right I love when a query is sent in you're not even then limited to what open cog and SingularityNet has then you can access access a whole bunch of other networks yeah that's right I mean that's how AI should be shouldn't be swallowed off it should be networks connected to other open networks and learning and growing from each other won't the Google's and Apple's and Amazon's of the world of Facebook's won't they die if they silo themselves and centralize themselves it remains to be seen I mean I think it's not important to me that they die but I think they won't be the dominant factor they didn't die when mainframes became less important there's still business niches for them they saw a lot of mainframes to banks they do services for big companies but they're not dominant anymore Wang computer died though so I mean I don't say that Google, Microsoft and Facebook will die what I say is they will not own the majority of AI anymore and you know what niches are best for them to occupy that really remains to be seen yeah interesting so then the giants could turn into niches because the giants could also turn into companies selling AI services on decentralized networks right I mean there's a lot of possibilities I mean as Microsoft is morphing into a cloud company right so I mean a company that's sufficiently agile their brand name persists but they can completely adapt Microsoft is offering Linux on Azure all over the place instead of Windows so I mean we're not opposed to any particular companies it's more the centralized modality of organization that we're trying to get rid of I mean what history suggests is some of the leading companies will find a way to adapt to the production of the industry and some won't find a way to adapt and they'll disappear I mean I have my guesses as to which ones will adapt and which ones won't maybe we have your guesses but that's neither here nor there I mean time will tell I would say there's a lot of people in leadership positions in Google and the singularity in advanced technology pretty well they have a fairly strong ability to adapt and not every big tech company shows that same ability to adapt but then the evolution of business is incredibly unpredictable like no one predicted IBM would be a services company but yet they manage to pivot so it's quite hard to tell who will pivot to embrace the decentralized there I mean you can see that in publishing industry also some publishing companies are going to flourish and some will disappear now how do we put our eggs in your basket because we're relying on your ethical and moral standards with the general intelligence that you're building as with anyone who would be building what we would be relying on we're relying on the community not just me personally in the unlikely event like I were invaded by a Martian mind virus that shit crazy and became malevolent I mean there's a load of other contributors to these projects so it's about seeding a community of people who are thinking in somewhat of a shared way in aiming to develop things in a benevolent manner and what are the guiding principles of your community that make it ethically and morally just grounded and that we can trust that sex drugs and rock and roll sex drugs and rock and roll yeah besides those besides that I think I mean at an abstract level the ethical principles I've written about are basically joy growth choice and continuity and I think all of these have an important value in a practical context I mean we're trying to promote happiness and doing good and we try to have a work environment in the community that's fun to be in I mean we're trying to grow and expand rapidly and create new patterns create new things new technologies new ways of being choice means we want everyone to have agency and that's an important part of the whole decentralized ethos there shouldn't be a few elites control everything and continuity means you want to respect the patterns of history as well as creating new patterns and this includes like persisting human beings into the future instead of replacing them with super AIs it also includes being respectful of historical cultures that exist now and certain people are very tied into and of course values like these are very nebulously defined though and sort of interpreting what they mean is part of what a community does and then approaching the end here what can we see come from the Hanson robotics ecosystem it's looking like we're talking about assisted meditation so the first thing is right now there's just a handful of human scale Hanson robots but we're working with a factory in Shenzhen to scale up manufacture so we should have within the next few years a massive number of robots coming out of the factory and I mean these will be purchased by customers for a variety of different purposes but the applications I'm most interested in are those that are you know explicitly promoting wellness health and growth among people so I mean meditation assistant is interesting I feel like I didn't give your last four points enough love a moment ago I just want to that's alright we're going to go soon I want to give them love though education is interesting thank you for composing those and for having that as an ethical and moral standard for building the community so I just wanted to say that we're also looking at making like a fully automated hospital room where you have sort of a Sophia type robot to provide conversation hear the patient's stories tell them stories answer their questions then I mean you have other robots to do physical things like up someone in a bed or change the bedpan or whatever then you have medical instruments in the room and all of these are integrated into a singularity that powered control system for the hospital room what's the practical one that maybe the consumer scale robots they're not going to be that cheap initially so probably the initial application of the human scale robots will be sold to stores hospitals companies and so forth it's going to be a few more years after that before the price comes down enough but then then when the price is low enough I mean you'll have home service robots everywhere just like in the Jetsons right I mean but much cuter than Rosie the robot so we're talking maybe like $10,000 up cost for now to companies and or even more I don't want to cite the price point because it's still to be determined it'll be leased each year actually probably interesting probably I mean I can't say for sure because that's Hanson Robach's business decision but I can see a future for a leasing model because everything's constantly being upgraded and improved and the other nice thing is that being able to upgrade and improve it the software can be done remotely but then you do have to ship in hard for hardware upgrades and what not yeah that's right hardware hardware is a pain but it's very useful to have okay and then I'm glad that we got as much as we did I want to are you what are your thoughts about the multiverse what are your thoughts about that it's there what do you want to know about it it's a big place so time happens all at once from some perspectives I'm a big fan of Revelli's relational interpretation of quantum mechanics which says you don't want to talk about a phenomenon in isolation you talk about a phenomenon in the context of a specific observer so an observer comma observed pair so I mean from our point of view situate as humans time is flowing in a certain direction right from a different point of view which is a more abstract view of a different sort of mind than we are then time happens all at once and not only that there's not just one time axis there's a lot of different time axes which are sort of floating out there in the space of patterns right I mean my general philosophy view of this is there's a much wider universe than this one I've used the word Yuri Cosmos to refer to that like wider cosmos right there's a wider cosmos our physical universe is viewed as like one conglomeration of patterns in that wider cosmos and if you want to look at you know weird poorly understood phenomena like reincarnation or seances those suggest that each of our individual minds has some sort of existence outside this physical world in some wider cosmos let's lead you to that quick do you think that the consciousness is localized in the central nervous system or that there is a soul or what are your thoughts about that the word soul is very overloaded with religious yeah I mean we don't have a good vocabulary for these things but no I I think consciousness is imminent in everything in the physical universe and also goes beyond this physical universe and that the individual consciousness associated with each of us can exist at times and places where our physical body is not there interesting which suggests a model in which you know our physical universe is embedded in some larger space and then maybe the mind patterns characterizing individual also have an existence that isn't respected to this 4d space time continuum so that and I've written I've written a bunch about this if someone Googles the coinage Yuri Cosm E U R Y Cosm which I made up it only exists in my writings on these crazy topics so I mean this is the sort of stuff I would love to be thinking about all day theories and how to experimentally poke at it right yeah because I think you could experimentally poke at it by poking it paranormal phenomena maybe in animals or something right so there's a lot of interesting research directions here and I sort of look at this sort of thing is almost where I was when I was a little kid it's just getting started there's limited amount of understanding no one gives a crap right so now I mean I sort of feel impelled to make AGI really happen on the other hand the part of my mind is bored with AGI because I don't think I know how to do it and I'm attracted to think about these other things that are like wide open and I barely know where to begin which is how I felt when I started with it right yeah it's so wide open and it's so fascinating it's going to unlock so much more beauty and potential it's so cool well an interesting question is if you have a superhuman AI will it figure out how to unlock all these spooky parts of the universe that we barely understand right now and I would imagine so I love it well with the general intelligence that you're building you'll have a lot to play with one would hope so so anyway we've reached the wider multi multi multi multiversal transcosmos so that that may indicate the conversation has expanded to a certain one one time and to collapse it down what about the formation of the mind of a child that is born into the world do you have a protocol we do a pretty good job we have an adequate amount of you know water and electricity and food and these basic necessities but the education of the mind at a young age to have some basics that you know to expose the children to that you think would be really helpful moving forward well I mean I've raised three kids I'm in the middle of the fourth one but I don't know them that sister come systematic about it I I generally speak to my kids as if they were adults and just explain the world to them in a simple but reasonable way and I tried to teach them all a lot of math science literature arts history and so forth and one of them became a mathematician and AI researcher the others didn't like math so much but they each learned a lot and went in their own direction I mean my second son is a Sufi mystic and an amazing classical pianist so they I mean my daughter did a degree in environmental science and is helping with the education in Ethiopia now so I mean I think kids intrinsically are curious and open minded so if you I mean if you let them explore different things and expose them to a lot of different information they're mostly going to grow in a beneficial way but this is like standard progressive education doctor and I would say I'm working with UNESCO and with Bethlehem Desi who's in our Ethiopia office on defining an advanced technology based curriculum which you want to roll out in schools around the world K through 12 so I help define the I help define sort of the high level the curriculum and then folks at UNESCO are working on the details and we're going to be testing that in schools in three or four countries over the next couple years but this is it's more about like let's get some cool technologies and let's put them in the hands of kids just in a way where they can explore and experiment with them but let's also get school systems in various nations to embrace this so that by doing this kids aren't doing something off to the side that doesn't help them pass the university entrance exam but that what they learn through this experimentation with the AI robotics biotech or something ties in with how they're assessed to let them move forward through the country's education system so I'm it gives them that experiential edge yeah so the challenge is we sort of know we know how to do that and I homeschooled all my kids to various parts of their childhood and I was also co-founded a charter school in New Jersey so I mean I see like progressive education methodologies are not that mysterious now and working tech into them in creative ways is not that mysterious the biggest challenge is structural and institutional and like if when one laptop per child went into Ethiopia where we have a big office so I spend a lot of time there I mean their laptops were perceived by the teachers there as a pain in the ass because kids just were playing with these cool educational games and you know making simulations composing music that was distracting attention from passing the exam that would get them into university which is quite challenging in Ethiopia so what you need to make the system embrace progressive education which is actually harder than defining how the progressive education should work because they're given the tool they're able to pursue what they love but then the system's requirements are you must fit into these boxes yeah yeah yeah and there like not a high percentage can go to college so I mean if you fail that university entrance exam it's bad it's not like the US where everyone can go to university so yeah and China is the same way like the university entrance exam is a huge deal really so you need if that exam is the focus and there's a limited amount of creativity that parents are going to let their kids pursue so this on unfortunately so like reforming the world's AI tech ecosystem I sort of see how to do like from the side but just build this decentralized network you know outsourced services to businesses from this network and let the whole thing spread on the other hand reforming the world's education system I don't see a way to do other than like work with governments to reform how they do assessment and evaluation because I mean otherwise you can provide all the cool like downloadable curriculum you want but if it's not what kids are forced to do when sitting in school eight hours a day and then it's going to have a real but limited impact by putting the assessments and examinations on the children we're automatically siloing time from them to those areas which then takes away from the other creative endeavors that they might be more passionate about so UNESCO is interesting in that they're embracing both advanced tech and progressive education so I'm trying to I'm working with them to to work with ministries of education in different countries then what are you not doing sleeping sleeping exactly that's what you're not doing you are an amazing human being this has been such a pleasure to talk and unpack this even in its first preliminary stages whatever we can do to help with our network of builders we'll do as well as hopefully when you're back in the bay we can do live events, the other promoting DAI and even more that you're up to so we can do that with Lisa we love Lisa as well so thank you again so much for coming to the show thanks for all the good questions it's too many questions to ask he's so awesome thanks everyone for tuning in give us a comment below with your thoughts about what we talked about it's so much to unpack also join the telegram join the public telegram join us there and also go build the future go build your destiny into the world go manifest that thanks everyone for tuning in much love we'll see you soon peace