Ben Goertzel

American AI researcher and entrepreneur who helped make artificial general intelligenceartificial general intelligence, n.: AI that could learn and do almost any mental task a capable adult can, rather than excelling at one narrow job. Experts disagree on the exact bar and on when, or whether, it will arrive. (AGI) the name of a research program. Taking up a phrase suggested by Shane LeggShane Legg, prop. n.: A New Zealand-born AI researcher who co-founded DeepMind and helped make 'artificial general intelligence' a mainstream term and goal., he and Cassio Pennachin titled their edited volume 'Artificial General Intelligence' (published 2007), and from 2008 he organized the annual AGI conference series, gathering researchers who sought broad, human-level machine intelligence when most of the field pursued narrow AInarrow AI, n.: AI built to do one specific job, or a small set of related jobs, such as playing chess or spotting spam, without being able to turn its skill to unrelated problems.. Trained as a mathematician (PhD, Temple University), he developed integrative cognitive architecturescognitive architecture, n.: A blueprint for a complete thinking system — how memory, attention, learning and decision-making fit together — used both to build general AI agents and to model how the human mind works. — Novamente and the open-source OpenCog framework (2008) — that combine probabilistic logic, evolutionary learning and neural components. He was chief scientist of Hanson Robotics, maker of the humanoid robot Sophia, and in 2017 founded SingularityNET, a blockchain-based marketplace for AI services, which joined the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance in 2024. He is a prominent advocate of transhumanismtranshumanism, n.: A movement holding that people should use technology, such as genetic engineering, brain implants or AI, to overcome human limits like aging, disease and death, and become more than human..