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Blockshow 2019: Todalarity Decentralizing the Global AI Synergy

Since the dawn of the fourth industrial revolution in the late 2000s, artificial intelligence (AI) has been one of the most discussed and misunderstood technologies. For many, it seems the term itself is too closely linked to popular culture and science fiction, causing unrealistic anxiety about AI replacing our human workforce as well as improbable expectations regarding the limits of the technology.

AI tools generally present a range of new functionality for businesses, and many processes have to this day been automated, however, the use of artificial intelligence that you are likely to encounter is still fairly limited. While AI does describe the simulation of human intelligence by machines, most AI we encounter in our day to day lives are, such as Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa, described as ‘narrow AI’ and are of relatively weak intelligence—capable of performing basic tasks within a very specific framework.

Artificial General Intelligence

The AI capabilities discussed at the Blockshow 2019 will go far beyond this framework. Two of the leading innovators in this space, Dr Ben Goertzel, CEO, SingularityNET and Toufi Saliba, CEO, Toda.Network have both been working separately on a much stronger types AI within their blockchain networks. Powerful AI also known as artificial general intelligence (AGI)—AI systems with learning human cognitive abilities. When presented with an unfamiliar task, an AGI system is able to find a solution without human intervention. Goertzel explained, “A SingularityNET network is a collection of “AI agents” that offer AI services to external clients and to other AI agents.” These AI agents can describe what services they offer, find other agents that meet given criteria and rate the quality of other agents thereby fostering the emergence of complexes of AI agents possessing a synergetic combined intelligence richer and greater than the sum of the intelligence of the component agents. According to Goertzel, the union of SingularityNET and the Toda.Network—Todalarity—will be at the core of the “emerging global brain.” Todalarity is essentially a product accelerator that aims to help new AI startups to integrate their products into the TODA and SingularityNET blockchain ecosystems.

Joining Forces

Saliba began his discussion by highlighting that if any of us were to search the terms blockchain, decentralized or AI—that 90% of the projects we would likely find would be “scams” that have no real future and a further 9% are not really innovating. He believes he has searched this space far and wide and has found his 1% in Dr. Goertzel. A quick comparison of their respective organizations’ missions would confirm this compatibility. Goertzel also acknowledged that the union is almost too perfect and that Toda.Network appears to be capable of overcoming the limitations he has found within the Ethereum blockchain, where his AI Agents currently exist. He described the Toda architecture as, “the next step in the evolution of the Internet of value.” I will defer further explanation of this partnership to Dr. Ben Goertzel who better explains the impetus in his recent blog post from Sept. 28.

Decentralizing Governance of the Global Brain

So why is it a necessity for Artificial Intelligence to have autonomous decentralized governance? Saliba explained it through a comparison to our smartphones. Today almost everyone has a smartphone. When smartphones emerged, many resisted them but soon found themselves uncompetitive in the market. It makes sense as a smartphone ultimately allows you access to the internet and a vast amount of information. Elon Musk has described modern people with smartphones as “cyborgs” but just with a slow connection. As mentioned above, smartphones already currently use narrow AI technology, notable apps like Siri but also in terms of predictive texts, search engine optimization, etc. In a sense, smartphones are intelligent. But for all that they provide, Saliba explained, “The way they are built today they can be controlled by a central agency.” Saliba stated that the interesting thing is that we are all contributing to building centralized AI but when the day comes. Still, when the centralized technology is at its peak, we will not want to buy it; we will be looking for decentralized AI services instead. Saliba hypothesized that smartphones of the future will likely be 8000 times more intelligent than people and may possibly come in the form of a weekly pill that we take to connect ourselves to the internet or global brain—this connection would essentially allow humans super intelligence. He conducted a quick straw poll with the crowd asking who in the room would take such a pill knowing that it could be overridden by a central agency. No hands were raised. He confirmed, “I usually get about zero percent on that question.” Saliba then asked who would take a pill that still offered such amazing enhancements but was decentralized, meaning no one could override the host. “About 96.338 %,” he joked at the overwhelming show of hands in the audience. Saliba stated, “So there’s the demand, and what we’re doing is setting the path towards proper autonomous decentralized governance so you can build a product that has a demand, and if it has a demand it will be profitable.”

Todalarity will launch in January of 2020 and will gather 100 of the most powerful AI engines from some of the best ventures in the world, and gathered in a single blockchain to give users access to the AI modifications they would like to leverage. Goertzel explained, “We’re working with Cisco, PICC, Dominos, various large companies to get them on board, the decentralized AI ecosystem but in the end, it’s not just about large enterprises. We need a robust startup ecosystem, building on all the decentralized platforms out there. And I think we can do something a lot more interesting than tech startups and the standard tech accelerators and incubators because the branding is something much more specific. What we’re aiming at with Todalarity is to take, let’s say, 100 startups with promising things that use AI or provide AI and basically help them to put their products into the decentralized ecosystem, which can be Singularity or it can be Toda.” He continued, “What we need is for all of the people who have amazing new ideas ready for AI, we don’t want them to just be creating a startup to be acquired by a big company. You’re going to be creating a startup that will provide to anyone in the world in a way that can be creatively utilized within the decentralized platform. So they can monetize their life without having to be acquired by a big company. And they can get smarter and smarter by the synergy with others as it connects to the decentralized network.”

Dr. Ben Goertzel—Striving towards an Autonomous Decentralized and Compassionate Artificial Super Intelligence

Dr. Ben Goertzel is the founder and CEO of SingularityNET, a decentralized blockchain-based Artificial Intelligence (AI) marketplace project. He has described the project as a medium for the creation and the emergence of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) as well as a way to roll out superior AI-as-a-service to every vertical market and enable everyone in the world to contribute to and benefit from AI.

Blockchain.News managed to catch up with Dr. Goertzel at the Blockshow 2019, in Singapore. In the first part of our interview, we discuss the evolution and the philosophical aspects of AI and AGI.

Evolution of Artificial Intelligence

For many, the concept of machines with the ability to learn and develop as humans, but with the enhanced calculation speed of a computer, is simply terrifying. Will the machines replace us, will we be able to contain them, or will we merge with them and how far away is this future?

While AI does describe the simulation of human intelligence by machines, most AI we encounter in our day to day lives are complex mathematical algorithms, such as Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa, described as ‘narrow AI’ and are of relatively weak intelligence—capable of performing basic tasks but only within a very specific framework.

Goertzel is aiming higher, essentially trying to birth a much stronger type of AI, also known as artificial general intelligence (AGI)—AI systems with assimilated human learning cognitive abilities. He explained, “AGI refers to an AI that can generalize way beyond what it has been taught and has seen, which means it can imaginatively guess elements about new domains of experience. This is extremely important in the modern world where we are forced to deal with unexpected circumstances all the time.”

Beyond AGI is where things get really exciting and may perhaps present a slightly existential challenge for humanity—artificial superintelligence (ASI). Goertzel said, “Artificial superintelligence is the next step beyond general intelligence. Humans currently have more general intelligence than the software products that are commercially available right now. But humans are by no means the most generally intelligent possible system. I think as AI advances further and further, you’re going to see AI as tremendously smarter than people much as we’re much smarter than monkeys, rats, or bugs. But I mean, to get from where we are now with narrow AI, to AGI, and then to artificial superintelligence, we need to go through quite a series of practical steps.” He continued, “That’s really what we’re engaged with at SingularityNET—the project is how to get through the next steps of the evolution—from where we are now, with fairly simplistic narrow AI towards a powerful general intelligence but also taking care to do it in a way that avoids putting the AI in control of these confused centralized global powerful parties—we want a decentralized general intelligence.”

The Singularity in SingularityNET

As Dr. Goertzel revealed, “The singularity in SingularityNET refers to the future foreseen by Verner Vinge and popularized by Ray Kurzweil—it basically is the moment at which technology starts advancing so fast, it seems effectively instantaneous to the human mind, and this is going to occur by AGI becoming smarter than people. AI will be doing the invention rather than people.”

Shortly before his death, at a conference in Lisbon, Stephen Hawking warned those in attendance that the development of artificial intelligence might become the “worst event in the history of our civilization.” He was alluding to what is known as the ‘technological singularity.’ Other notable intellectuals of our time including Tesla’s Elon Musk and neuroscientist Sam Harris have also delivered a number of foreboding speeches regarding the innovation, believing it may be the start of our impending doom and will ultimately replace us completely or even worse—simply discard us in the course of an intermediary task as HAL 9000 discarded the lives of the astronauts in favor of completing the mission of the Discovery One.

Goertzel does not share this apocalyptic view but sees an opportunity for humans and machines to evolve together, he said, “AI will almost certainly become far more intelligent than human beings. But there will be a possibility for humans to follow the AI along and effectively fuse their minds with the AI—which Elon Musk, among others, are also working on with his company Neuralink. I would say humans who choose not to fuse with the AI will indeed be, in a sense, left behind as they will no longer be among the smartest beings in this region of the universe.”

Artificial Compassion for Humanity

The fact that AI will become much smarter than people do not necessarily mean that AI is a danger to humans. Goertzel explained, “That all depends on how they are built, what we want is AIs that are compassionately disposed toward human beings. That is also why at SingularityNET we’re so focused on creating a democratically controlled AI mind because if the first true general intelligence is controlled by a military organization or an advertising agency, then this probably isn’t optimal in terms of gathering a beneficial general intelligence to emerge into a compassionate, supermind.”

So how do you put compassion into a machine? How can you teach an AI about empathy and concepts as abstract as love? The reality is that even as humans, we are unable to display or enact these concepts with any real consistency. Goertzel said, “You don’t program empathy into the code of the AI; these things will be learned by the AI. Compassion will emerge within the AI in the course of its interactions with the world—including the humans in the world and the physical world. It’s very similar to a child, you don’t program emotions or compassion into a child; they gain it through interactions with the world.” He added, “So the task of AI is to build a learning system and a self-organizing system that can organize its own mind; its own feelings; and its own compassion in an appropriate way. It is complex, but the internet is complex, your mobile phone is complex, your laptop is complex, I mean, humanity has built many complex things, and these are built by a combination of many complex people working together.”

At the comparison of an AI developing as a child would, I could not help but consider the amount of children that grow up to be sociopathic—often making impulsive decisions or breaking rules with little or no feelings of guilt or wrongdoing. Goertzel admits, “Humanity is certainly a complex mess with aspects that are both positive and negative according to the value systems of various parts of humanity. I think the best we can do is put an AI out there in the world and expose it to the various aspects of humanity and make sure that it’s biased in a positive direction.”

Goertzel himself is a father of four children and a grandfather to one, speaking from experience he said, “Protecting them from all the bad things in the world is something you can only do to a limited extent because eventually, they’re going to go out there and interact with some harsh realities—but you can bias what you expose them to in a positive direction.”

The reality of our future according to Goertzel, is that AGI is coming regardless and what we can do is ensure that it is not solely disposed towards the whims of a powerful central authority and that it is taught compassion for humanity. He said, “AI will be used for military purposes, it will be used for advertising and even crime. We have to make sure that AI is also used, and to a greater extent, for education, agriculture, healthcare or scientific discovery. The AI will get all these things integrated into its mind and be able to form a whole picture of human values and culture to form a substantial inclination towards compassion.”

Sum of Many

Goertzel clarified that the creation of the future AGI global intelligence will not be done solely by his team at SingularityNET, it will be the combined work of a vast community of AI and technology developers as well as the information that the AI agents on the network are able to absorb from human consumers who leverage the network.

He said, “If Singularity is going to play a key role, then we need to be massively growing the user base of SingularityNET—we have to drive massive adoption of these decentralized networks that we have launched. After two years of work, we have a pretty nice version of the SingularityNET platform out there. It’s a decentralized network which is democratically governed and controlled—meaning the AI network is sort of controlled by the AI agents in the network, rather than by some outside party. It’s a nice bit of software and we’ve shown it works.” Concluding he said, “If humanity wants to transition from AI to AGI and then to super intelligence in a democratic and participatory way then networks like SingularityNET need to be a significant part of the mix, which is easy to see from an abstract view but from practice on the ground, there’s still a lot to be done to get adoption of this sort of platform.”

Dr. Ben Goertzel—Creating an AI Marketplace for Paypal’s 286 Million Users

Exclusive interview with Dr. Ben Goertzel of SingularityNET: Part 2 (Link: Part 1)

Dr. Ben Goertzel is the founder and CEO of SingularityNET, a decentralized blockchain-based AI marketplace project. He is one of the world’s foremost experts in Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and has decades of experience leveraging AI to create solutions in natural language processing, robotics and even national security. In addition to being the Chairman of the OpenCog Foundation and the Artificial General Intelligence Society, he has authored around 20 books and 140+ research papers.

In this second part, we discuss SingularityNET’s recent projects and collaborations with Toda Network, PICC Services and the adoption potential of its recent PayPal integration.

PayPal Integration to SingularityNET

The integration of PayPal’s service represents a significant step forward for SingularityNET and its community.

By making its AI marketplace easily accessible to PayPal’s 286 million users, SingularityNET opens its doors to a much wider scope of customers. Earlier versions of SingularityNET’s marketplace required customers to pay for AI services offered by AI agents in the network directly using the AGI utility token. With the recent update, the marketplace is now open for customers who have no experience with cryptocurrency.

On the integration of PayPal as an alternate payment interface to cryptocurrency for SingularityNET’s AI services, Goertzel said, “It opens the door to getting much broader utilization of AI services. What we have found when reaching out to people who are creating products that need AI is that they typically don’t have an Ethereum wallet and their company doesn’t want to be dealing with cryptocurrency due to volatility concerns.” Personally he added, “Eventually I would like to see the decentralized cryptocurrency economy render services like PayPal and the whole Fiat economy obsolete, but this is the reality we live in and this integration is a huge step for continued AI adoption.”

The increase in AI adoption enabled by PayPal integration will accelerate the realization of SingularityNET’s vision of a decentralized marketplace powered by blockchain technology and based on tokenomic incentives, serving customers across vertical markets and achieving increasing levels of Artificial General Intelligence.

Todalarity — Two Worlds Collide

In the global AI market, there are many imposters with vague ideas and a lot of underwhelming development looking to capitalize on the technological buzz and the corporate spending on automated processes. On a panel at the Blockshow 2019 by Cointelegraph—Toufi Saliba, CEO, Toda.Network acknowledged that true innovators and developers to partner within AI were in a minority of around 1% of the market, he views his partnership with Dr. Goertzel as “finding my 1%.”

Saliba and Goertzel have known each other for some time and both are strong believers of the libertarian and decentralized aspect of the blockchain world and want to see a democratic and participatory focus in the way money, information, AI and data are organized. In the first part of interview with Dr. Goertzel, we focused mainly on the philosophical aspects of AGI and the need for the emerging global brain to be decentralized and democratically governed. According to Goertzel, the union of SingularityNET and the Toda.Network—Todalarity—will be at the core of the “emerging global brain.”

After SingularityNET launched its initial Beta version on the Ethereum network, it became clear to Goertzel that the Ethereum blockchain was not able to meet the needs of the project. He said, “I knew that Toufi had the Toda.Network so I looked into it and found it had a very interesting architecture and it appeared to have the ability to scale to the needs that SingularityNET has right now.” Together they built a simple private prototype version of SingularityNET running on Toda and found it worked very well. Goertzel said, “It’s very fast and very simple to work with, I really became a believer in Toda after that, the technology is very cool and scalable. So I had to find a way to bring our two worlds together.”

Todalarity is essentially a product accelerator that aims to help new AI startups to integrate their products into the Toda.Network and SingularityNET blockchain ecosystems by providing some engineering assistance, advice and even some injections of funding. Goertzel highlighted, “There are two communities this we are aiming at—one is the developers with AI algorithms that would like to access SingularityNET as a marketplace and Toda as a tool to allow their AI to leverage decentralized networks. The second group we are reaching out to is the people who have products that need AI and we want to make it easy for them to access the decentralized SingularityNET or Toda.Network instead of going to a centralized vendor.”

PICC Financial Services

Singularity Studio, the for-profit spin-off of SingularityNET recently signed a “Strategic Cooperation Memorandum” with PICC Financial Services, the wholly-owned FinTech arm of the People’s Insurance Company of China (PICC). The MOU is to open a new accelerator in Beijing to promote the development of AI and blockchain-based services for the insurance market.

The initial focus is on applications such as AI-enabled marketing, linguistic and voice recognition, smart evaluation and settlement of claims, and the use of blockchain to manage the supply chain and identify fraud. Goertzel said, “One of the more interesting projects with PICC is regarding auto-insurance claims and being able to analyze photographs of damaged vehicles to give an estimate on repair costs. This is difficult and requires some reasoning from the AI agents and requires multiple AI tools to interact and provide a response to what’s wrong with the car.” He added, “They’re also having some issues involving speech analysis for Chinese language and we have some interesting AI tools for deep neural net speech analytics running in Singularity.”

Adoption is Key

Besides the financial benefits, the main impetus behind the many enterprise collaboration projects that SingualityNET is facilitating growth in the network’s AI agents. The AI agents interact and learn from each other, new challenges means more learning and teaching and AI agent copying. New stimulus and work mean that the AI is growing and together forming an intelligence greater than the sum of its parts.

Goertzel reiterates this sentiment saying, “Really by working with PICC, Cisco, Dominoes other large enterprises, it’s stimulating more and more AI for the network. Because in the course of voice analytics, or say image analytics regarding car engines, the AIs that are filling the network to serve PICC’s or Cisco’s needs remain in the network to be used for other purposes, so you’re building out just the overall capacity in the network, much more so than if we were just building proprietary software for these companies.“