“Only a small community has concentratedon 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. . . ” –MarvinMinsky as interviewed in Hal’s Legacy, edited by David Stork, 2000. Our goal in creating this edited volume has been to ?ll an apparent gap in the scienti?c literature, by providing a coherent presentation of a body of contemporary research that, in spite of its integral importance, has hitherto kept a very low pro?le within the scienti?c and intellectual community. This body of work has not been given a name before; in this book we christen it “Arti?cial General Intelligence” (AGI). What distinguishes AGI work from run-of-the-mill “arti?cial intelligence” research is that it is explicitly focused on engineering general intelligence in the short term. We have been active researchers in the AGI ?eld for many years, and it has been a pleasure to gather together papers from our colleagues working on related ideas from their own perspectives. In the Introduction we give a conceptual overview of the AGI ?eld, and also summarize and interrelate the key ideas of the papers in the subsequent chapters.

This book is a collection of writings by active researchers in the field of Artificial General Intelligence, on topics of central importance in the field. Each chapter focuses on one theoretical problem, proposes a novel solution, and is written in sufficiently non-technical language to be understandable by advanced undergraduates or scientists in allied fields. This book is the very first collection in the field of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) focusing on theoretical, conceptual, and philosophical issues in the creation of thinking machines. All the authors are researchers actively developing AGI projects, thus distinguishing the book from much of the theoretical cognitive science and AI literature, which is generally quite divorced from practical AGI system building issues. And the discussions are presented in a way that makes the problems and proposed solutions understandable to a wide readership of non-specialists, providing a distinction from the journal and conference-proceedings literature. The book will benefit AGI researchers and students by giving them a solid orientation in the conceptual foundations of the field (which is not currently available anywhere); and it would benefit researchers in allied fields by giving them a high-level view of the current state of thinking in the AGI field. Furthermore, by addressing key topics in the field in a coherent way, the collection as a whole may play an important role in guiding future research in both theoretical and practical AGI, and in linking AGI research with work in allied disciplines

Ray Kurzweil has projected the date for a Technological Singularity as 2045. AI researcher Ben Goertzel believes it could potentially happen much sooner, if appropriate attention and resources are focused on the right R&D projects. What current technologies are most likely to lead to the rapid advent of powerful Artificial General Intelligence systems? What impact will the advent of such technologies have upon human life? What philosophical, scientific and spiritual ideas should be deployed to explore such questions? How probable are Terminator type outcomes, versus friendlier scenarios where advanced artificial intelligences play a beneficent role to humanity and other sentiences? What should be our top priorities now, looking forward to a radically different AI-centric future? This book gathers together essays that Ben Goertzel wrote during the period 2009-2011, for H+ Magazine and other periodicals, which explore these issues from various directions. Each essay is presented along with a brief personal introduction discussing the context in which the essay was written, and reviewing relevant developments from the period 2012-2014.

The Hidden Pattern presents a novel philosophy of mind, intended to form a coherent conceptual framework within which it is possible to understand the diverse aspects of mind and intelligence in a unified way. The central concept of the philosophy presented is the concept of "pattern" minds and the world they live in and co-create are viewed as patterned systems of patterns, evolving over time, and various aspects of subjective experience and individual and social intelligence are analyzed in detail in this light. Many of the ideas presented are motivated by recent research in artificial intelligence and cognitive science, and the author's own AI research is discussed in moderate detail in one chapter. However, the scope of the book is broader than this, incorporating insights from sources as diverse as Vedantic philosophy, psychedelic psychotherapy, Nietzschean and Peircean metaphysics and quantum theory. One of the unique aspects of the patternist approach is the way it seamlessly fuses the mechanistic, engineering-oriented approach to intelligence and the introspective, experiential approach to intelligence.