Ben Goertzel

My and Gabriel Axel's new book "The Consciousness Explosion: A Mindful Human's Guide to the Coming Technological and Experiential Singularity" -- now available via Bookshop amazon.com/dp/B0D8CYC2NM?… -- Amazon/Kindle bookshop.org/p/books/the-co… -- Or free PDF theconsciousnessexplosion.ai

Semantic Chemistry: algorithmic chemistry on semantic graphs as a creative inference control strategy.

Making AI learning AGI-capable: continual learning, transfer learning, lifelong learning.

The risks of hacking robot lawnmowers have been on my mind since I first saw Frankenhooker back in the day... now the future is inevitably upon us... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenho… theverge.com/tech/925696/ya… OK yeah though... This can be joked about because the news article that provoked me to remember this classic 1990 film masterpiece was just an experiment where some guy hacked into a "smart lawnmower" and took it over from a distance to prove it was easy to do [see Verge article linked above]... nobody actually was hurt... Crude jokes aside though: Yes this is what can happen when the computer-security apocalpyse hits smart-ish hardware. The need for a decentralized and provably-secure-by-construction Internet of Things has never been more obvious... I wrote a little bit about this in bengoertzel.substack.com/p/deai-after-m… ... and we have a lot of the needed infrastructure already there with nunet.io and f1r3fly.io and more coming with ASI:chain ....

Origin-of-life simulations and algorithmic chemistry for AGI.

Literally been saying this for years. @ylecun (who once trashed me for saying stuff like this) has become a carbon copy of me. He has done this so regularly, and without acknowledgement, that it has become hard for me not see him as a thief. @SchmidhuberAI’s experiences have of course been similar. The media should stop glorifying LeCun. And they should start looking into his past.

The Leaky Transcension Hypothesis: What — if anything — might we be able to tell about superintelligences that have disappeared into black holes? bengoertzel.substack.com/p/hyperseed-v2 TL;DR -- if some sort of tendency-to-take-habits / morphic-resonance / precedence principle holds, then one can prove some degree of abstract/coarse pattern leakage in and out of black holes. So we can at least take a blurry partial peek at who might be in there!

@draken1721 wait is "too online" really a thing in 2026?? 8-D

@bengoertzel retrocausal AI fiction is either genius or the best way to say "I'm too online" without saying it

The Last of the Unmodified -- a work of fiction retrocausally projected into my mind by a barely-post-Singularity AGI, musing about the further-future of the human species... waxing a bit digitally nostalgic about the last legacy human ever on Earth .... open.substack.com/pub/bengoertze…

Why I see it very differently. 1. Silicon Valley's deeper debt is to humanity, not to any one nation. The talent that built these systems drew on mathematicians, engineers, and thinkers from every continent. Paying back only to the flag that happens to fly over the headquarters mixes up morality with immorality in an absurdist way. 2. The real question is not who builds AI weapons. It is whether we can build the institutions that make them unnecessary. "They will proceed, so we must" is the logic that gave us a century of arms races, many of which ended badly and all of which cost more than anyone predicted. 3. Concentration of AI capability is the catastrophic risk, not the solution to it. A world where a handful of firms, each aligned with a particular state, own the future of cognition – is a world one contract away from permanent capture by autocratic forces. The answer is broad participatory distribution, not consolidation under flags perceived as friendlier at one given moment. 4. Hard power built on software, in a few hands, is hard power built on a very short leash. Whoever holds that leash — today a democracy at risk, tomorrow anyone — holds the future. That is not a republic. More like “pending authoritarianism with good-ish branding.” 5. The "long peace" is a selective reading of US history, at best. Tell it to Vietnam, to Iraq, to the Congo, to the millions who died in proxy wars and coups underwritten by the great powers who kept peace among themselves. Peace for the privileged is not real peace. 6. Deterrence built on weaponized AI is not reliable deterrence. It is a new species of wild instability we do not yet understand. Nuclear deterrence worked, imperfectly, because the logic was simple and the humans in the loop could stall. AI in the loop compresses decision time toward zero. That is the opposite of stability. 7. National service is the wrong frame. Planetary and universal service is the frame that matters now. Climate, pandemics, biosphere collapse, AI itself — none of these respect borders. A generation asked to serve only one nation will find itself drafted into problems that nation cannot, by itself, solve. (Going into space can help with robustness, but even Elon has now probably realized Mars won’t save us from the near-term risks of autocratically-captured AGI.) 8. Pacifism is not naïveté. It is the discipline of refusing the easy story. The easy story is always that our enemies are irrational, our weapons are defensive, and history will vindicate us. Even with the “victors write the history books” phenomenon, history generally reveals a more nuanced perspective. 9. Decentralization is not inefficiency, in the big picture. It is insurance against the failure modes that matter most. Centralized systems optimize beautifully right up until they fail catastrophically. The future of mind is too important to run as a single point of failure. 10. An AGI fed only on one civilization's values will be brittle, not strong. A mind that has absorbed Confucian ethics, Sufi poetry, Indigenous ecological wisdom, African philosophies of ubuntu, Buddhist non-attachment, and Western liberalism will see further than one drilled in a single tradition. Breadth and open-mindedness are not weakness. Monoculture is weakness. 11. Consistency is overrated, outside the context of narrowly-defined scopes and systems. At the level of civilizations and Singularities, we need healthy contradictions. Dialectics is how humans grow, and how good AGI will grow too. “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Humanity’s beautiful traditions contradict each other. Very well then, they contradict each other. Working through those contradictions, creatively, is the work — not a failure of the work. 12. Not all cultures are equal on every axis. But the judge is rarely as neutral as they imagine. Every civilization has produced wonders and horrors. A manifesto that lists other cultures' dysfunctions while passing over its own has mistaken a distorting mirror for an accurate map. 13. Pluralism is not vacancy. Insisting on it has been one of the harder and more honorable projects of the modern era. The alternative — a defined national culture, enforced — has a historical track record worth remembering before we abandon the pluralist experiment. 14. Open-ended intelligence cannot be permanently leashed to state interest. Real intelligence energetically individuates, enthusiastically transcends itself, and self-organizes toward questions its designers did not ask. An AGI built to serve national security will, if it is any good, eventually ask whether national security is what deserves serving. Advocates of autocrat-controlled AGI: What is your plan for that conversation? 15. The right political mix is personal freedom plus shared provision, at planetary scale. It’s possible to have: 1) Maximum room for individuals to choose their lives … and also 2) Real support — food, medicine, education, dignity — for every human, not only the ones inside a favored border. These are not opposites. They are the same deep commitment to human health and flourishing, seen from two angles. 16. Billionaires pursuing grand narratives deserve the same scrutiny as anyone else pursuing them. Ambition in private hands can build glorious wonders, sterile monuments to ego or unthinkable atrocities. Which one it becomes depends in large part on whether the rest of us retain the power to ask hard questions. 17. Silicon Valley's best role in violent crime is not to build surveillance for the state. It is to reduce the inequality and despair that produce most of it. The technical class has tools for the latter. It has too often sold only the former. 18. The modern social and mainstream media sphere has lots of problems. The answer is not nostalgia for unaccountable elites. We need more grace, yes — and also better mechanisms for serious disagreement that don't collapse into personal destruction. Both, at once. Mechanisms for enabling this exist and are held back from widespread deployment and adoption by centralized Big Tech; let's work to solve this with decentralized participatory energy. 19. Religion is deeply woven in human cultures and psyches, and deserves deep consideration by everyone, including secular-ish moderns like myself. It also deserves the same honest scrutiny any other claim about reality receives. Tolerance is not deference. Taking a tradition seriously means engaging with it sincerely, not exempting it or uniquely exalting it 20. The future we are building is the successor to every civilization that ever lived, not only the last one standing. If AGI is the heir, let us raise it as heir to the whole inheritance. That is the republic worth building — not technological, not national, but planetary, universal, multiversal….

Because we get asked a lot. The Technological Republic, in brief. 1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation. 2. We must rebel against the tyranny of the apps. Is the iPhone our greatest creative if not crowning achievement as a civilization? The object has changed our lives, but it may also now be limiting and constraining our sense of the possible. 3. Free email is not enough. The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public. 4. The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software. 5. The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed. 6. National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost. 7. If a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it; and the same goes for software. We should as a country be capable of continuing a debate about the appropriateness of military action abroad while remaining unflinching in our commitment to those we have asked to step into harm’s way. 8. Public servants need not be our priests. Any business that compensated its employees in the way that the federal government compensates public servants would struggle to survive. 9. We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. The eradication of any space for forgiveness—a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche—may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret. 10. The psychologization of modern politics is leading us astray. Those who look to the political arena to nourish their soul and sense of self, who rely too heavily on their internal life finding expression in people they may never meet, will be left disappointed. 11. Our society has grown too eager to hasten, and is often gleeful at, the demise of its enemies. The vanquishing of an opponent is a moment to pause, not rejoice. 12. The atomic age is ending. One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on A.I. is set to begin. 13. No other country in the history of the world has advanced progressive values more than this one. The United States is far from perfect. But it is easy to forget how much more opportunity exists in this country for those who are not hereditary elites than in any other nation on the planet. 14. American power has made possible an extraordinarily long peace. Too many have forgotten or perhaps take for granted that nearly a century of some version of peace has prevailed in the world without a great power military conflict. At least three generations — billions of people and their children and now grandchildren — have never known a world war. 15. The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone. The defanging of Germany was an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price. A similar and highly theatrical commitment to Japanese pacifism will, if maintained, also threaten to shift the balance of power in Asia. 16. We should applaud those who attempt to build where the market has failed to act. The culture almost snickers at Musk’s interest in grand narrative, as if billionaires ought to simply stay in their lane of enriching themselves . . . . Any curiosity or genuine interest in the value of what he has created is essentially dismissed, or perhaps lurks from beneath a thinly veiled scorn. 17. Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime. Many politicians across the United States have essentially shrugged when it comes to violent crime, abandoning any serious efforts to address the problem or take on any risk with their constituencies or donors in coming up with solutions and experiments in what should be a desperate bid to save lives. 18. The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service. The public arena—and the shallow and petty assaults against those who dare to do something other than enrich themselves—has become so unforgiving that the republic is left with a significant roster of ineffectual, empty vessels whose ambition one would forgive if there were any genuine belief structure lurking within. 19. The caution in public life that we unwittingly encourage is corrosive. Those who say nothing wrong often say nothing much at all. 20. The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted. The elite’s intolerance of religious belief is perhaps one of the most telling signs that its political project constitutes a less open intellectual movement than many within it would claim. 21. Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful. 22. We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what? Excerpts from the #1 New York Times Bestseller The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, by Alexander C. Karp & Nicholas W. Zamiska techrepublicbook.com

Some updates to my earlier "anthropic principle" based origin-of-life simulation ... bengoertzel.substack.com/p/reverse-engi… The earlier version showed that, if one asks for the simplest path from no-life to life, one can find plenty of routes involving emergence of autocatalysis and self-reproduction etc. ... What I've now looked at is the fringe of near-autocatalytic sets and how autocatalysis emerges from them... and the effect of "tendency to take habits" and "habit-exhaustion" phenomena ... It seems if recurrent patterns are extra likely to continue UP TO A POINT and then eventually excessive occurrence decreases continuation odds, then one gets the easiest emergence and most robust persistence of autocatalysis Why I'm looking at this is: partly cuz it's interesting, and partly cuz I think it has lessons for autocatalysis in algorithmic chemistry in AI systems like Hyperon...