The Birth of Artificial Intelligence

Yesterday I was lucky enough to meet with Ben Goertzel in his lab at Hong Kong Science Park to take a tour of Hanson Robotics and meet with the team working on his Artificial General Intelligence project, OpenCog. The lab itself was not that impressive, a fairly cramped space filled with synthetic disembodied faces attached to robot frames. But it was a humdrum of activity as all around people were fiddling with wires and adjusting faces and furiously typing away at their keyboards. And even though the space they are working out of may not be overwhelming awe inspiring, what they are attempting to do here is. To put it simply, they are trying to create humanoid robots that are as intelligent as we are.