AI Scientist Ben Goertzel Explains the Singularity to Joe Rogan

The term singularity that you guys are using, the way I've understood that term, correct me if I'm wrong, is that it's going to be the one innovation or one invention that essentially changes everything forever. The singularity isn't necessarily one invention. The singularity, which is coined by my friend Werner Vinge, who's another guy you should interview. He's in San Diego too. A lot of guys, a lot of brilliant guys down there. Werner Vinge is a science... A lot of military down there. Yeah, Werner Vinge, he was a math professor at San Diego University actually, but well known science fiction writer. His book, Fire Upon the Deep, one of the great science fiction books. Can you spell his name please? V-I-N-G-E. V-I-N-G-E. Werner Vinge. G-E. Yeah, brilliant guy. Fire Upon the Deep. V-E-R-N-E-R. Verner. Yeah, V-E-R-N-O-R. Oh, V-E-R-N-O-R. Yeah, he's brilliant. He coined the term technological singularity back in the 1980s. Really? But he opted not to become a pundit about it because he'd rather write more science fiction books. That's interesting than a science fiction author. Ray Kurzweil, who's also a good friend of mine, I mean, Ray took that term and fleshed it out and did a bunch of data analytics trying to pinpoint like... When it's gonna happen. But the basic concept of the technological singularity is a point in time when technological advance occurs so rapidly that to the human mind it appears almost instantaneous. Like imagine 10 new Nobel Prize winning discoveries every second or something, right? So this is similar to the concept of the intelligence explosion that was posited by the mathematician I.J. Goode in 1965. But I.J. Goode said then the year before I was born was, the first truly intelligent machine will be the last invention that humanity needs to make, right? So this is intelligence explosion is another term for basically the same thing as a technological singularity. But it's not just about AI. AI is just probably the most powerful technology driving it. I mean, there's AI, there's nanotechnology, there's femtotechnology, which will be building things from elementary particles. I mean, there's life extension, genetic engineering, mind uploading, which is like reading the mind out of your brain and putting it into a machine. There's advanced energy technologies so that all these different things are expected to advance at around the same time. They have many ways to boost each other, right? Because the better AI you have, your AI can then invent new ways of doing nanotech and biology. But if you invent amazing new nanotech and quantum computing that can make your AI smarter. On the other hand, if you could crack how the human brain works and genetic engineering to upgrade human intelligence, those smarter humans could then make better AI's and nanotechnology, right? So there's so many virtuous cycles among these different technologies. The more you advance in any of them, the more you're going to advance in all of them. And it's coming together of all of these that's going to create radical abundance and the technological singularity.