[AndrewKemendo]

It doesn't even matter what's in the article, the fact that this is on the HN front page tells me it's going to happen - though who knows when

For context I've been "into" AGI since I read the term in the late 1990s in a Ray Kurzweil book and decided that I was going to work my whole life to realize it

Much later, Ben Goertzel (arguably the guy to popularize the term) was my Masters Thesis advisor, at the National Intelligence University in 2013 (Literally a secret graduate school program for people in the intelligence community). My thesis was "How will AGI impact national security."

Almost nobody cared then, though I did have a lovely lunch with Yoshua Bengio in 2014 at the Quebec AGI conference. Ben has hosted the AGI conference since 2008 and it has always been sparsely attended.

In fact bringing up AGI was likely to get you laughed out of any gathering of computer scientists - and outside of that it was pure speculative science fiction.

It's tragically sad to me that, inevitably, the early people who have been thinking about and working on and pushing this vision since day one will likely not be the ones who realize it. Such is life

edit: Worth acknowledging that this was the original vision of computers after all - the business people fucked it up

[celdon25]

It really doesn't take much for anything to get on the HN front page. And upvotes are often done as a way to bookmark a thread before even knowing the quality of it.

Ben's conferences are low in number because the audience he's targeting is smaller. Peter Thiel co-hosted the Stanford Singularity Summit in 2006 (which is where I happened to meet Ben G in person for the first time). There had to have been at least 1000 people there. In 2006.

It's not about the content, it's how you sell it. But at least we can both agree that the linked article is useless.

[thom]

I was always impressed by Ben on the old singularitarian and SL4 mailing lists. This was back in the days before deepnets took over and other approaches were still popular (and people still harked back to Eurisko as the state of the art in general intelligence). I feel like his impact has been lower than it should have been, although I suppose the rest of the main characters from around then have disappeared into AI institutes to play various forms of elaborate LARP.

[tomrod]

Aye. The business folks picked it up because there is so much value in figuring out good-enough automation. I reckon you've probably seen your share of that per your bio (Kessel Run especially).