Report on the 2nd International Conference on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI-09)

General Intelligence, was held March 6-9 in Arlington, Virginia. Pascal Hitzler chaired the program committee. The first day of the conference featured in-depth tutorials on leading AGI systems and approaches, including introductions to the SOAR, Texai, and OpenCog software, and overviews of the logic-based, reinforcement learning and program-induction approaches to AGI. Following this, the main conference on Saturday and Sunday featured a number of themed sessions: Evaluation and Metrics (chaired by John Laird), Robotics and Embodiment (chaired by Itamar Arel), Cognitive Architectures (chaired by Pei Wang and Stephen Reed), Logical Approaches to AGI (chaired by Selmer Bringsjord), Learning and Reasoning (chaired by Selmer Bringsjord), Speech and Language (chaired by Moshe Looks), and Self-Awareness and Consciousness (chaired by Ben Goertzel). There were fewer industry participants because in early 2009 (due to the global economic crisis) many U.S. firms were restricting On the other hand there was an Emanuel Kitzelmann, Martin Hofmann, and Ute even greater international participation, including Schmid, from the Cognitive Systems Group at the a keynote speech by Juergen Schmidhuber (from University of Bamberg, who work in the AI tradition IDSIA, in Lugano, Switzerland, and the Technical of "inductive programing." Their paper University of Munich) and a large number of presentations described a clever way to reformulate the conclusions from German researchers.

Within the time of a human generation, computer technology will be capable of producing computers with as many artificial neurons as there are neurons in the human brain. Within two human generations, intelligists (AI researchers) will have discovered how to use such massive computing capacity in brainlike ways. This situation raises the likelihood that twenty-first century global politics will be dominated by the question, Who or what is to be the dominant species on this planet? This article discusses rival political and technological scenarios about the rise of the artilect (artificial intellect, ultraintelligent machine) and launches a plea that a world conference be held on the so-called "artilect debate."