Ben Goertzel on AI and the Singularity: The Future Is Ours To Create

Today my guest on Singularity 1 on 1 is Ben Goertzel. During our 40 min conversation we cover a wide range of topics such as: Ben's original interest in time travel and science fiction; his decision to start working on artificial general intelligence and his views on the potential time-line thereof together with his evaluation of the software vs hardware requirements for building it; scientific funding for AI research in both the USA and China; the technological singularity and our chances of surviving it. As attested by his short bio below, Ben is a brilliant AI scientist with an incredibly wide spectrum of interests and talents. Even more, I can't help it but mention that he is also a truly nice guy because due to some technical difficulties he was willing to patiently reschedule our interview twice before we finally managed to get it right. Given the number of other things that Ben is juggling within his busy schedule, it would have been only natural for him to cancel.