The time for the victory of artificial intelligence over human civilization has been announced: three years left

The computer scientist and CEO who popularized the term artificial general intelligence (AGI) believes AI is on the verge of an exponential “intelligence explosion.”

As the Daily Mail writes, Ph.D. mathematician and futurist Ben Goertzel made this prediction while concluding this month’s AI General Intelligence Summit: “It seems likely that we will be able to achieve human-level AI within, say, the next three to eight years.” .

“Once artificial general intelligence reaches human levels,” added Goertzel, who is sometimes called the “father of AGI,” “in a few years you will be able to have completely superhuman AGI.”

While the futurist admitted he “could be wrong,” he went on to predict that the only obstacle to runaway, cutting-edge AI – far more advanced than its human creators – would be the bot’s “own conservatism,” which advises caution.

Goertzel made his predictions during closing remarks at the 2024 Benefit AI Summit and Unconference, sponsored in part by his own firm, SingularityNET, of which he is CEO.

“There are known unknowns and probably unknown unknowns,” Goertzel acknowledged during a speech at an event held this year in Panama. “No one has yet created human-level artificial general intelligence (AGI); no one has a clear understanding of what when we achieve this.”

But unless the computing power required, in Goertzel’s words, “a quantum computer with a million qubits or something like that,” the exponential growth of AI seemed inevitable to him.

“Personally, I believe that once you reach human-level AGI, within a few years you can achieve completely superhuman AGI,” he said.

In recent years, Goertzel has been exploring a concept he calls “artificial superintelligence” (ASI), which he defines as artificial intelligence that is so advanced that it matches all the brain capabilities and computing power of human civilization.

Goertzel listed “three lines of converging evidence” that he said supported his thesis.

First, he cited updated work by longtime Google employee, futurist and computer scientist Ray Kurzweil, who developed a predictive model suggesting that AGI will become achievable in 2029.

Kurzweil’s idea, which will be detailed in his upcoming book The Singularity Is Coming, relied on data confirming the exponential nature of technological growth in other technology sectors to help guide his analysis.

Goertzel went on to list all the notable recent improvements made to so-called large language models (LLMs) over the past few years, which he noted have “unveiled many in the world to the potential of artificial intelligence.”

Finally, the computer scientist, donning his signature leopard-print hat, turned to his own infrastructure research aimed at connecting different types of artificial intelligence infrastructure, which he calls “OpenCog Hyperon.”

The new infrastructure will combine more mature artificial intelligence and new forms of artificial intelligence that can target other areas of cognitive thinking besides language, be it mathematics, physics or philosophy, to help create a more comprehensive true AGI.

Goertzel’s “OpenCog Hyperon” work has received support and interest from other AI researchers, including Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR), which published a paper last month that he co-authored with Databricks CTO Matej Zaharia and others .

This is not the first potentially dangerous or certainly bold prediction about AI that Goertzel has made in recent years, the Daily Mail notes.

In May 2023, a futurist said that AI could replace 80% of human jobs “in the next few years.”

“Almost any job that involves paperwork,” he said at a web summit in Rio de Janeiro that same month, “should be automated.”

Goertzel added that he doesn’t see anything negative about this, arguing that it will allow people to “find something better to do than work for a living.”

The self-proclaimed panpsychist, who said he believes even a “coffee cup has its own level of consciousness,” has suggested that researchers work on creating “soft superintelligence.”

Goertzel also proposed an AI-based cryptocurrency rating agency capable of identifying fraudulent tokens and coins.

But the futuristic computer scientist is perhaps best known for his work on the robot Sophia, the first robot to gain legal citizenship.