Dear Singularitarians,
On May 11, 1997, Gary Kasparov, one of the greatest chess players of all time, was defeated by IBM’s Deep Blue. Humanity’s dominance in chess was over. From that day, Kasparov began a journey to learn how computers could augment the capabilities of human chess players. Over time, he developed Centaur Chess - a new variation of the game in which humans partner up with machines to compete with other similarly structured teams. According to many chess experts, such hybrid teams or modern day “Centaurs” are much harder to beat. It appears that when the creativity, intuition and the genius of a human are paired with the memory and computational powers of a machine, the resulting force is more resilient, adaptive and performs much better.
Just like chess, the nature of work has changed.
The New York Times published an article on the role that SingularityNET can play in breaking up the Big Tech’s hold on AI.
By 2027, the majority of workers in the US are expected to be freelancers - working semi-independently and owning/lending their own work tools. Like the chess players that augmented their capabilities, these workers of the future will be able to maximize their own output through a symbiotic relationship with AI services. We believe it is extremely important that these AI services are not controlled by only a few entities. SingularityNET, as Dr. Ben Goertzel explains in the New York Times article, “lets you have a network of A.I.s that nobody owns."
Over the last month, in order to highlight the changing nature of work and SingularityNET’s role in accommodating the workers of the future, we decided to create a Graphic Novel imbued with our message. Furthermore, in our recently launched #AGICHAT campaign, we selected the theme “Future of Work” to encourage a debate in our community about this critical issue and to learn from their views.
Most importantly, we made great progress in all the aspects of our mission to democratize AI.
Tech Updates
Thanks to the hard work of our team members, we have moved closer to the beta version of the platform and have updated our roadmap progress bars to reflect the changes. Our community members will be glad to know that the Service Daemon and the Multi-Party Escrow components of the platform have seen significant progress.
The progress in the development can also be gauged through the Github commits. A commit is a new addition to the SingularityNET codebase by a contributor to the project. We had 42 public repositories on our Github when we published the previous newsletter. Since then, the technical development team has made 588 commits in the SingularityNET Github repositories . We now have 45 Repositories on Github.
As of now, the total commits in the Repositories of SingularityNET equal 111,379 .
AI Research Lab
Our AI Researchers are actively involved with cutting-edge AI that adds to the uniqueness and competitiveness of SingularityNET as a platform. The research articles published since the last newsletter include:
- Liquid Democracy for Distributed AI Systems by Dr. Anton Kolonin, explores the dynamics of creating reputation consensus and liquid democracy, based on an open ledger protocol, for distributed AI systems.
- Graphs Part 3 by Dr. Anton Kolonin, focuses on how to use Aigents Graph Analysis to visualize and better understand Blockchain and Social Networks.
Business Strategy
Team
“At SingularityNET we believe in recognizing and appreciating the hard work of our team members. I would like to congratulate Ibby Benali on being promoted to the position of Marketing Manager reporting to me. Also, congratulations to Andreas Tsamados and Matthew Mahaffey as new hires for our team. Both Andreas and Matthew are active members from the SingularityNET community, and we are proud to continue the practice of hiring talent from the community” – Arif Khan, VP Marketing
We are always looking for motivated individuals who seek to join the movement to democratize AI. If you would like to become a part of the ecosystem of passionate minds that is striving toward a future where AI is used to decrease the economic inequalities in our societies, please click here.
Media Updates
Dr. Ben Goertzel, Sophia, and other team members represented SingularityNET through various events, publications, and interviews since the last newsletter. Notable media mentions and blog posts include:
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The New York Times - How the Blockchain Could Break Big Tech’s Hold on A.I.
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FastCompany featured Ibby Benali, Hedra Yusuf, and Betelhem Dessi in an article titled ‘Meet the African women who are changing the ratio in tech’.
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We published the First Episode of our Graphic Novel: The Dreams of Satoshi
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The Better Human Project Podcast - Dr. Ben Goertzel and the host Ryan Munsey discussed the coming technological singularity.
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Futurism - Dr. Ben Goertzel shared his thoughts on when we can expect an AI as smart as a human.
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Forbes - Human 2.0 is Coming Faster Than You Think - an article in which Dr. Ben Goertzel shared his views on how we will evolve with the times.
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Yahoo - published an interview with Dr. Ben Goertzel.
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Arif Khan published the Second Part of our Tech Oligopoly series.
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Big Think - published a survey conducted by SingularityNET and GoodAI, which revealed that 37% of AI researchers believe that human-level AI will be achieved within 5 to 10 years.
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Instilling the Best of Human Values in AI - an article by Dr. Ben Goertzel where he highlights how we can seed the AGI we create with our values as an initial condition.
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Arif Khan published The Right to Disclosure, in which he explored the dangers of deception by artificial intelligence and sophisticated machines.
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Ibby Benali published Regulating AI: what to expect from the EU.
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AiTHORITY and AI Business published interviews with Dr. Ben Goertzel.
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Inverse - Dr. Ben Goertzel discusses longevity and how the first person to live for a thousand years might already be alive.
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Dr. Ben Goertzel published Toward an Analytical Understanding of Unconditional Love.
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Creative Destruction Lab hosted an event in Toronto - Dr. Ben Goertzel spoke about “what kind of AGI are we moving towards?”
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Ibby Benali represented SingularityNET at the Future of Trust Summit and at the European Parliament.
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Video: CNBC Cryptotrader News
An interview of Dr. Ben Goertzel, on CNBC’s Cryptotrader News
The AGI Podcast
In July, we launched our podcast to serve as an educational platform for our community. To involve our community members in our initiatives, we invited them to submit their suggestions for the official name of our podcast. We are thrilled to announce that the name “AGI Podcast” has been selected as the winner! The name was suggested by the community member Frederick Sowemimo , who received a gift of appreciation from the team.
For the Third Episode of the AGI podcast, we invited Pascal Kaufmann to discuss AGI and The Brain Code. For the Fourth Episode of the AGI Podcast, we invited Azeem Azhar to discuss the Political Economy of AGI.
AI Talent Spotlight
As part of our goal of empowering AI talent, we highlight the profiles of individuals that are at the forefront of the mission to democratize AI. We hope this series inspires the broader community.
For the second part of our AI Talent Series, we interviewed our community manager Tim Richmond , so that the community could get to know more about him. For the third part of our AI Talent Series, we invited AI and Blockchain Architect Dr. Anton Kolonin , to find out what it means to him to be a part of SingularityNET.
Upcoming Events
Dr. Ben Goertzel and the team will be representing SingularityNET at the following events:
1 November: Malta Blockchain Summit, Msida
5 November: Web Submmit, Lisbon
9 November: TransTech Conference, Palo Alto
5 December: AI Summit, New York
Community News
Graphic Novel: Dreams of Satoshi
In this ‘crypto culture meets pop culture’ graphic novel, you are brought to the year 2045 and following the story of Damien. Find the first episode of ‘Dreams of Satoshi’ right here on the forum.
An excerpt from the first episode of our graphic novel: The Dreams of Satoshi
Creative Tweet Competition
We thought that it was high time for Ben to get on the Joe Rogan podcast to talk about AGI. To achieve that goal, we started a creative tweet competition to utilize our greatest asset: the SingularityNET community. While we will update the community shortly on the progress, we would like to once again thank the community for their support and love. The tweet by Reddit user MiranaNightshade was selected as the winner by the community. Here is another creative tweet that was made by Reddit user mtznr :
SingularityNET Meditation Session
Tim Richmond, our community manager, organized a Meditation Session in virtual reality to reach out to the universe, dive within ourselves, and connect with the baseline of reality. As Tim writes: “through meditation, it is possible to reach a state of self-abstraction, a state where one may feel the deeper levels of connection to the baseline of consciousness, mind, and reality.”
#AGICHAT Campaign
We are really interested in finding out what our community thinks about some of the most compelling and provocative questions surrounding the run-up to and attainment of the technological singularity. To achieve our goal, we launched the #AGICHAT Campaign. In this campaign, we set a theme once every two weeks. We then post a theme-related question of the day in our community forum every weekday and announce the daily question across our social media using the hashtag #AGICHAT. We are curious to hear your perspectives on the questions asked!
Women in Tech and African Talent
We are proud of the developments made by our team members in Africa. We would like to highlight the profile of one of our team members from iCog Labs, Betelhem Dessi - whose accomplishments and efforts to help the youth of Ethiopia prepare for the future, were recently covered in a CNN article. You can read the article over here.
Furthermore, FastCompany wrote about Ibby Benali, Betelhem Dessi, and Hedra Yusuf here, demonstrating how SingularityNET is at the forefront of hiring and promoting women in tech. As Ibby Benali states: “At SingularityNET, we are hiring every woman, man, humanoid, you name it, that has the right talent to build it from the ground up […]. We cannot afford to miss out on talented women, we really need them”. Therefore, we encourage everyone to share our job positions with talented people in your circle!
CNN recently published an article that covered the accomplishments of one of our team members from iCog Labs, Betelhem Dessie.
That is it for this newsletter! Be sure to join our Telegram Channel and Community Forum, and follow us on Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn!
Thank you for your continued support,
The SingularityNET Team
