Research Program

Education and Outreach

Marvin Minsky, one of the founders of AI, said in an interview in 2000:

    Only a small community has concentrated on 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 and quit wasting time on little projects that don't contribute to the main goal.

The situation has improved a little since 2000. One sign is the increasing number of AGI-focused workshops at mainstream conferences, including:

  • Artificial General Intelligence Workshop (AGIRI.org, May 2006)
  • Integrated Intelligent Capabilities (AAAI, July 2006)
  • A Roadmap to Human-Level Intelligence (WCCI, July 2006)
  • Towards Human-Level AI? (NIPS Workshop, December 2005)

In light of increasing interest in AGI, SIAI is co-sponsoring AGI-08, to be held at the University of Mephsis' FedEx Institute of Technology in early 2008. Co-organized by SIAI Director of Research Dr. Ben Goertzel and Outreach Director Bruce Klein, together with Dr. Stan Franklin, Dr. Pei Wang, and other leading researchers in the field, AGI-08 will be the first full-scale research conference devoted to Artificial General Intelligence.

However, gathering people together is not enough. On the whole, the recent AGI-related workshops have made a number of things clear:

  • There is a healthy, creative research community dedicated to AGI.
  • This community is extremely fragmented, consisting of different teams operating from radically different perspectives, with rather little sharing of ideas or tools, and little cognizance of each others’ work.
  • The notion of AGI safety and beneficial use is largely foreign to the nascent academic and industry AGI research communities.

During Phase I of our research program, we have two main goals:

  • From a scientific perspective, to advance knowledge about how to create safe AGI, and software tools that further its development.
  • From a social perspective, to create conceptual and software tools usable by the AGI community at large – tools that will increase the rate of progress specifically toward AGI that is safe and beneficial.

The ideas, tools, and technologies we develop will improve the coherency of the AGI research community, and play a role in moving its discourse toward a more serious consideration of safety and beneficial application.