Distributed, Decentralized, and Democratized Artificial Intelligence

Gabriel Axel Montes*1,2,3,4, Ben Goertzel5,6,7

1University
of Newcastle, University Drive, Callaghan, NSW 2308, Australia
2Hunter Medical Research Institute, 1 Kookaburra Circuit, New Lambton Heights, NSW 2305, Australia
3Bias in Research Node, Charles Perkins Centre, University of Sydney, University Pl, Camperdown NSW 2006, Australia

4Neural Axis, United States

5Xiamen University, 422 Siming S Rd, Siming Qu, Xiamen Shi, Fujian Sheng, China, 361005

6OpenCog Foundation, Hong Kong

7SingularityNET Foundation, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Keywords: artificial intelligence, blockchain, decentralization, consciousness, ethics, governance

Abstract Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, Baidu, etc.). While the world’s

The accelerating investment in artificial intelligence has vast im-
plications for economic and cognitive development globally. How-
ever, AI is currently dominated by an oligopoly of centralized
mega-corporations, who focus on the interests of their stakehold-
ers. There is a now universal need for AI services by businesses
who lack access to capital to develop their own AI services, and
independent AI developers lack visibility and a source of revenue.
This uneven playing field has a high potential to lead to inequitable
circumstances with negative implications for humanity. Further-
more, the potential of AI is hindered by the lack of interoperability
standards. The authors herein propose an alternative path for the
development of AI: a distributed, decentralized, and democratized
market for AIs run on distributed ledger technology. We describe
the features and ethical advantages of such a system using Singu-
larityNET, a watershed project being developed by Ben Goertzel
and colleagues, as a case study. We argue that decentralizing AI
opens the doors for a more equitable development of AI and AGI.
It will also create the infrastructure for coordinated action between
AIs that will significantly facilitate the evolution of AI into true
AGI that is both highly capable and beneficial for humanity and
beyond.
1. Current Pains in AI
Artificial intelligence is a rapidly growing industry with
widespread predictions of dramatically changing the eco-
nomic and labor landscape of the world. By 2020, the global
AI market is projected at $47 billion (USD) and the global
big data analytics market at $203 billion. To date, the over-
whelming majority of AI development is done by a handful
of technology mega-corporations (e.g. Facebook, Google,
population is over 7 billion people, only around 10,000 peo-
ple in roughly seven countries are writing the code for all of
AI (Shen, 2017). By remaining in the hands of a few, the
trajectory of AI applications may be significantly compro-
mised. The datasets used to develop such AI and the AIs
themselves are biased and may not be generalizable to the
wider population, and the companies are beholden to their
stakeholder’s interests. The result is a ‘technocracy’ in
which the future of one of the most potent set of technolo-
gies in the history of humankind is spoken for by a small
biased minority.
The potential of AI is also bogged by several factors cur-
rently afflicting the AI landscape: (1) AI is fragmented by a
closed development environment; (2) each company tends
to focus on one or a few narrow tasks; (3) the various AI
agents are uninteroperable, as no interoperability standards
exist; and (4) there is an absence of a formal infrastructure
for AI cooperation. Moreover, the current market has some
acute needs to be addressed: (5) the work of AI academics
and independent developers is out of reach in GitHub repos-
itories’ (6) there is a lack of large datasets; and (7) the finan-
cial means for building a custom AI remains out of reach for
independent developers and small- to mid-sized companies.
One phenomenon that occurs because of these acute market
needs is that independent developers remain practically in-
visible unless they go through the startup ecosystem, which
often serves as a de facto recruitment mechanism for the
tech titans (Newman, 2017), who also have been recruiting
ravenously from academia (Gibney, 2016; Kahn, 2017).

Corresponding author:
info@gabrielaxel.com (Gabriel Axel Montes)
Given these considerations, their concentrated efforts to de-
velop artificial general intelligence (AGI) are unlikely to be
positioned for the greatest ethical and beneficial impact pos-
sible. The capabilities, resources, and speed of AI develop-
ment by mega-corporations would far exceed those of other
parties.
It has been previously argued by one of the authors that
the creation and development of AI is a product of a recur-
sive externalization and projection of human cognition into
the form of external artefacts (G. A. Montes, 2017a), build-
ing a kind of ‘extended mind’ (Clark and Chalmers, 1998).
This process began with niche construction (Odling-Smee et
al., 2003) by pre-historic tool-fashioning hominins and
snowballed into increasingly complex artefacts (e.g. art, ar-
chitecture, calculators, computers) and has reached a high
point today with AI. This process is slated to continue until
and through the cognitive artefacts can resemble and fluidly
interact with humans as well as self-replicate, i.e. a full syn-
thetic and/or biohybrid AGI with self-reproductive capabil-
ities. The implications of this process—termed ‘causal bio-
mimesis’—are gargantuan, because what is replicated/re-
produced into the artefacts is largely propelled and deter-
mined by the values of humans and the designers and engi-
neers of the artefacts (G. A. Montes, 2017a). There is there-
fore a constant imperative to participate in the future of the
species and planet within a limited time and efficacy win-
dow.
A central implication of causal biomimesis for the ethics
of AI is this: if humans are en route to create an AGI that
represents human cognition and that will ostensibly have a
large effect on humanity, sentient beings, the planet, and
ventures into outer space, then AI/AGI needs to account for
the whole range and gestalt of human ability rather than a
miniscule portion of it. This includes the full gamut of cog-
nition, affect, self-organization, autopoiesis (Maturana and
Varela, 1991), and non-ordinary abilities (Goertzel et al.,
2017; G. A. Montes, 2017b) that capture the neurodiversity
of the human (and arguably other non-human) species. The
needs and motives of tech giants is arguably much narrower
than this, and/or their manifestation of these would be con-
strained by their interests. Although, there has been a recent
effort to establish a “Partnership on AI” joint venture be-
tween AI mega-corporations (Chui, 2017), the centralized
and for-profit nature of these corporations plus competition
between them is potentially comprising to optimal AI/AGI
development and ethics. What could be a more ethical ap-
proach to building an AI that can make space for social
good, moral machine decision-making, value-alignment,
and fairness and transparency?
2. Decentralizing AI
In contrast to the current landscape of AIs concentrated in
skyscraper silos, herein the authors expound on how and
why the ethical value of a decentralized AI is more promis-
ing. Functionally speaking, high-level potential gains from
a decentralized AI network could include a coordinated
AGI, a global commons infrastructure, universalized stake-
holdership, and democratic governance. It is worth going
into more detail as to how these may be achieved by using a
platform that is currently being developed (led by Ben
Goertzel) based on distributed ledger technology (DLT),
SingularityNET, as a case study of the kinds of features,
goals, and ethical implications of what a truly decentralized
AI could look like. It is the first of its kind and is poised to
influence the evolution of the AI field and may potentially
inspire the emergence of like-minded entities, and is thus
worth discussing.
2.1 Distributed Coordination
SingularityNET is a platform for an open AI marketplace in
which buyers and sellers exchange AI services via distrib-
uted ledger technology (DLT) and AI agents transact with
each other. The DLT currently used by SingularityNET is
blockchain. Blockchain uses distributed ledgers to establish
consensus among the community rather than privately
(Swan, 2015). A ‘smart contract’ contains if-then logic to
enact agreements between two parties and is automatically
executes payment when the conditions stipulated in the con-
tract are fulfilled. Blockchain allows for decentralized inter-
party agreements without the need for a middle man. In this
case, the parties would be AI merchants and AI agents
within the network. AI sellers would wrap their AI in the
SingularityNET API, which then gets incorporated into
smart contract templates. With DLT as a foundation, a dis-
tributed, decentralized AI network can be enabled.
With blockchain, the AI playing field can begin to level
out. Independent developers can exercise fee-free owner-
ship over their intellectual property, receive compensation
for their work at a market price of their choosing, maintain
data sovereignty and privacy, and transact with whom they
wish in an open market. An independent developer or small-
to medium-sized company who is in socioeconomic circum-
stances that may dim chances of joining a large corporation
now has an outlet through which to capitalize on their work.
Such affordances of DLT can improve social good by ac-
commodating into an ecosystem a diversity of AIs and de-
velopers beyond the limited scope of oligopolistic interests.
2.1.1 Self-organizing Cooperation
In the case of SingularityNET, a DLT architecture further
enables cooperation between AI agents themselves. To un-
derstand the ethical implications of such a freshly new and
potentially paradigm-shifting technology, it is worth
expounding on a number of details. A cooperation of AIs
could: purchase new capabilities, monetize their assets, au-
tonomously improve, coordinate functions, tackle new in-
dustries, develop emergent skills, outperform competitors,
vastly improve accuracy, leverage newfound access, and
boost processing power. Coordinated AI at scale could
achieve: (a) synergy by combining AI agents into the needed
technology stacks; (b) access to a library of datasets and
open AI technology; (c) a market for buying and selling ser-
vices, (d) from datasets to analysis, to a global market of AI
buyers; (e) the creation of new AIs to coordinate existing
datasets and AI agents.
Coupled with the participation of smaller corpora-
tions/businesses and independent providers of AI services,
cooperative AIs could significantly multiply the reach, po-
tency, utility, and profit on those AI services. The techno-
logical utility of the cooperation capability would attract us-
ers and grow the network, increasing the likelihood that a
decentralized AI network would have market demand, trac-
tion, and thus impact.
A native token would be the medium for exchanging AI
services and for AI agents coordinating amongst them-
selves., with users being able to buy into and out of the net-
work using other major currencies (e.g. USD, EUR, CNY,
BTC). A native token contributes to the robustness and sur-
vival of the network by: (1) enabling liquidity for AI micro-
services; (2) enabling native governance for steering net-
work development and resist outside manipulation; and (3)
making the network globally open without being tied to any
external economies, which could make the network vulner-
able to manipulation by elites in those unrelated economies.
Examples of AI services would include and not be limited
to: image video processing, language processing, datasets
for training AI, dataset analysis, exchanging processing time
or memory for tokens. While the deeper details of the eco-
nomic logic of SingularityNET bear on the behavior of
agents in the network and have more nuanced ethical rami-
fications, they are not in the scope of this paper.
SingularityNET is a network designed with interoperabil-
ity, data sovereignty and privacy, modularity, and scalability
in mind. As a whole, the network forms a “decentralized
self-organizing cooperative” (DSOC); smart contracts are
used amongst AI agents (nodes) and external parties to ac-
cess the network, transactions are a union of economic and
cognitive (thanks to AI) logic, a native internal “currency”
(or token) enables exchange and a democratic governance
process, and the SingularityNET Foundation provides lim-
ited high-level stewardship. Such an innovative economic
mechanism is designed to catalyze human and machine in-
telligence toward a new form of ethnically beneficial self-
organizing intelligence, as we will explain.
2.1.2 Multi-agent Interaction
Because most current AI is still considered ‘narrow AI’, in
most cases, there will be multiple agents that can fulfill a
request within the network in different ways and degrees.
This permits complex networks of dependency. In Singular-
ityNET, such a network among agents exchanging offers for
services or services for payments is known as an offer net-
work, which the founders have explored in prior publica-
tions and prototypes (Goertzel, 2014, 2017). Each request to
the network will require a unique combination of agents, and
therefore a key dynamic of the SingularityNET network as
a whole will involve matchmaking agents. Such functions
will comprise cloud-based ‘cognitive services’ in exchange
for micropayments. This will be able to occur on software
and/or hardware. Internet of Things (IoT) or robots can carry
out small network transactions with each other based on
purely local network interactions where internet connectiv-
ity may be an issue. Agents will also be able to spawn and
train new independent AIs, allowing the network to auto-
coordinate and evolve (Fig. 1)
Figure 1. Example of the creation of AI agents by other AI agents.
An agent trained on deep learning models for video processing cre-
ates other AI agents that specialize in particular kinds of video
processing.
Another crucial element of coordinated AI is that network
nodes can collaborate in building gigantic, decentralized da-
tasets. In SingularityNET, data producers can specify pri-
vacy restraints and other restrictions on their data, and con-
tributors receive percentage payments. This marks a major
relief of the current pain of tech giants hoarding very large
datasets, leaving smaller companies struggling with access
to data and without expertise to turn their data into useable
form.
 By enabling coordinated AI and multi-agent interaction,
data ownership and access to gigantic datasets are decentral-
ized, thus taking an important step to democratize access to
AI technology and its benefits. This “bottom-up” approach
has vast implications for the future of AI, both as a field and
as a market. In the case of SingularityNET, the cooperation
enabled by a DLT architecture has baked in transparency
from the ground up; marketplace merchants can track their
contributions and reap financial reward as datasets and co-
operative services grow and evolve.
2.1.3 Democratic Governance
For a decentralized and free market of AIs to maintain a ben-
eficial trajectory as it grows increasingly complex, incen-
tives in addition to financial ones may need to be incorpo-
rated. Otherwise, it would be easy for bad actors to take ad-
vantage of the lack of regulation and game the system to
achieve control, swaying the trajectory of AI development
and AGI evolution in potentially undesirable directions. For
this reason, SingularityNET’s architecture includes a repu-
tation system that incentivizes actions that are healthy for
the whole network. A voting system is implemented
wherein network operations and distribution of tokens are
governed democratically. Voting is filtered by reputation,
such that only agents with a certain base reputation can par-
ticipation in voting, owners whose agents have higher repu-
tation have more voting power, and there is protection
against gaming schemes which attempt artificial upvoting.
The system is a kind of “proof of contribution”, where con-
tribution means investing, creating, and gaining a decent
reputation in the network. Liquid democracy will allow
agents to delegate votes to other agents, mitigated by smart
contracts.
2.1.4 Beneficial AI
In addition to a reputation system, a decentralized and self-
organizing AI would be even better served if there was a
mechanism that could steer the long-term development of
the system to be of greater benefit to humanity and the
world. Because of unpredictable market dynamics, reputa-
tion as described above alone would be insufficient for an
AI system that aims to be ethical because reputation in this
case is largely based on utility rather than a greater good that
goes beyond arbitrary and potentially volatile aggregations
of internal values. For greater social good beyond the myo-
pia of the internal networks, a beneficial and altruistic com-
ponent would be apropos.
In previous work (Goertzel, 2016, 2015; Goertzel et al.,
2012), the founders of SingularityNET have voiced the view
that positive outcomes in AI are best militated by encourag-
ing the application of AI to positive/beneficial causes and to
as AI grows, it is supportive and inclusive of as much of
humanity as possible. The OpenCog technology that is part
of the foundation of SingularityNET has been applied in this
way, such as autism therapy (Hanson et al., 2012),
biomedical research (Goertzel et al., 2008, 2006; Smi-
grodzki et al., 2005), and assisting people in achieving
health states of mind (Goertzel et al., 2017). In Singulari-
tyNET, a certain percentage of tokens will belong to a “ben-
eficial reserve”, which are gradually distributed to agents
with a sufficiently high reputation and that are also verified
as beneficial agents. Some of the beneficial reserve will also
be allocated to external human-run organizations who are
democratically judged to be beneficial to the network. Fur-
thermore, agents receive ‘benefit votes’ based on their ben-
efit ratings. Essentially, a project is certified as beneficial
when it receives a non-trivial plurality of votes among ben-
efit voters, and then it becomes entitled to its share of benefit
tokens.
Taken together, an agent’s reputation consists of owner-
ship, stake, validation, and benefit rating. The beneficial re-
serve fosters a virtuous cycle with the network wealth be-
cause (1) the more wealth in the network, the more valuable
the beneficial reserve; and (2) using tokens from the benefi-
cial reserve will drive agents in new directions otherwise not
pursued. Network diversity is thereby increased. More di-
versity of AI has notable ethical implications, namely the
resultant tendency to lead to a broader, more general intelli-
gence that represents a wider swath of humanity’s capabili-
ties, skills, and interest. Furthermore, a greater overall net-
work value attracts more users, thereby organically cultivat-
ing an economy of users in the decentralized network. These
users are then working according to the beneficial ethos of
the network, which in turn propagates beneficence as a value
among more AI merchants and agents.
3. Technology and Values
AI is widely considered the next digital frontier (Chui,
2017). The features of a DSOC such as SingularityNET ex-
emplify the potential of decentralized AI. The goals in this
case are to: (a) reduce friction and costs in machine-to-ma-
chine interactions; (b) maximize open and international ac-
cess to a world of developers; (c) facilitate dramatic growth;
(d) provide resources to projects and technology that are
democratically approved as beneficial; (e) provide open,
worldwide, frictionless access; (f) promote AI curation and
discovery; and (g) encourage good behavior and AI diversi-
fication. DLT allows the AIs to keep track of the transac-
tions throughout the network without the need for a central-
ized control, and homomorphic encryption (through cryp-
tography) allows agents to privately share with agents and
permissions of choice. This level of user freedom is un-
matched in current AI skyscraper silos, where employees
who work on the code are bound to company policy regard-
ing the release of source code and use of open-source soft-
ware.
 Decentralized AI affords functions that could transform
the AI landscape with positive ethical effects. AI can be un-
siloed and made to coordinate and cooperate with other AIs,
breeding an economy of AI-as-a-service. Discovery mecha-
nisms increase visibility of otherwise also siloed independ-
ent developers and small businesses. AI developer talent can
be incentivized to earn financial reward for their work more
quickly without necessarily going through the startup eco-
system or into elite academia. Access to powerful AI tools
and datasets earlier in a developer’s career path affords an
opportunity to bolster the professional development of each
developer more than if they had to wait for a long time with
little to no reward, then settling when they get hired by a
well-paying company with its own scope of interest, which
may not necessarily align with the developer’s. In this point,
we can envision an alignment between values and work ear-
lier on in a personal/career path, something that is arguably
not uncommonly compromised as an individual sublimates
into the corporatist system conveyor belt, as many develop-
ers might forgo adhering to their positive value structures in
order to gain income.
Basic value structures have shown common trends across
individuals and societies, wherein entities exhibit a general
trend to evolve from ego- to ethno- to world-centric
worldviews and values (Beck and Cowan, 1996; Cowan et
al., 2005). Through a coalescence of political, benefit, and
research-oriented motives, a decentralized AI platform such
as SingularityNET can serve as a benevolent steward for hu-
manity, with the more of the human race as a whole partici-
pating in the growth of AGI. While there have been many
all-too-optimistic propositions of technology improving eth-
ics, the present case study demonstrates how a combination
of features baked into the technology positions it to become
a diverse and flexible decentralized breeding ground of in-
telligence.
3.1 Balanced Governance
There are, naturally, limitations to the potency of democ-
racy. Winston Churchill’s famous quote extols the virtues of
democracy while also, to a degree, acknowledging (and ac-
cepting) its imperfection: “It has been said that democracy
is the worst form of government except all the others that
have been tried” (Churchill, 1947). Austrian economist
Hans-Hermann Hoppe has argued (Hoppe, 2011) that a de-
mocracy is like having a tenant temporarily renting a prop-
erty; s/he does not have the same incentive to care for the
property as would the actual owner of the property; the latter
cause would be analogous to a monarch. SingularityNET
understands some of the limitations of democracy, and that
is why it attempts to carefully balance decentralized demo-
cratic governance with a limited degree of high-level benev-
olent stewardship. The SingularityNET Foundation plans to
refine the democratic governance mechanisms for optimal
function and gradually shift the network to a full democracy.
In this process, SingularityNET has identified potential at-
tack vectors on the network, and is installing safeguards and
corrective mechanisms that prevent gaming or manipulation
of the system by bad actors or coordinated AIs. In any case,
with the its own governance structure not bound to external
economies plus benevolent intent, a DSOC of AIs in the vein
of SingularityNET is poised to promote maximal liberty and
sovereignty for owners and AI agents, and great benefit to
humanity.
3.2 Accelerated AGI Development
It is worth commenting on the name of the organization,
“SingularityNET”, and its connotations. The authors main-
tain that AI and AGI will have a prominent role to play in
the future of humanity. Many refer to the fusion of artificial
and human intelligence as the “Singularity” (Kurzweil,
2010). Rather than dismiss the remarkable progress being
made by large corporations toward advanced AI and the in-
creasing integration of AI into the techno-social fabric, the
founders of SingularityNET aim to introduce into the market
an alternative that is able to attract AI talent and make a
mark in the trajectory of AI development. If/when there may
be a “Singularity”, we aim to maximize the chances that it
may be a benevolent one where the voices of humans across
a great range of socio-economic demographics are included
as well as their efforts rewarded. As humans, we believe that
we have a stake and are choosing to participate in the mo-
mentum of AI rather than stand on the sidelines. Addition-
ally, scenarios have been publicly suggested in which tech
titans and governments would have to provide some form of
universal basic income (UBI) to offset workforce displace-
ment by AI advancement. We would like to attempt to dis-
rupt the narrative of that potential scenario, even if partially,
to maximize the chances of individuals maintaining liberty
and sovereignty in a human-AI/biohybrid future.
A goal of SingularityNET is the accelerated development
of AGI. This may give some pause, and it is worth briefly
justifying this underappreciated facet. (1) As stated previ-
ously, it is important to acknowledge that AI will integrate
into the fabric of society, whether by its own merits and/or
by the wish-fulfilling prophecies/projections of and lust for
AI by the masses, and that therefore participation in the de-
velopment of AI and AGI is exponentially more powerful
than abstention, particularly when the intention is benevo-
lent. (2) A distributed, decentralized, and democratic AI is
better able to receive ethical training because of the wide
variety of humans acting in parallel to construct and refine
the network, and therefore any AGI that emerges will better
represent humanity than the limited AIs of skyscraper silos.
As per the earlier discussion of causal biomimesis, the val-
ues of the humans and engineers involved will shape the AI
artefacts that snowball into mega-niche construction (G. A.
Montes, 2017a). (3) As discussed in previous work by the
founder of SingularityNET (Goertzel et al., 2012), develop-
ing AGI sooner than later helps to prevent it from outpacing
ethical theorizing. AGI development is currently suffi-
ciently slow that ethical theorization can keep up. Crucially,
if substantial work on AGI is already underway at this phase,
then substantial ethical work can be accomplished in the
near term before rapid punctuated technological advances
by centralized corporations occur.
The effort to develop AGI should also be coupled with
the development of ‘Global Brain’ technologies (Goertzel,
2012; Goertzel et al., 2012; Heylighen, 2007), which are to-
gether defined as:
“…the composite, self-organizing information system
comprising humans, computers, data stores, the Inter-
net, mobile phones, and other communication sys-
tems.”
From a Global Brain, which would be facilitated by DSOCs
like SingularityNET, we can “foster deep, consensus-build-
ing interactions between divergent [human] viewpoints”
(Goertzel et al., 2012). To make this technology as valuable
as possible, it is important that it be created quickly enough
to use the blended viewpoints and volition that it extracts
into the shaping of the first powerful AGIs. For these rea-
sons, the rapid and measured development of an AGI vis-à-
vis democratic mechanisms like the ones proponed by Sin-
gularityNET is desirable.
4. Conclusion
The authors have presented a basic high-level overview of a
DSOC platform that uses DLT to create a distributed, de-
centralized, democratized cooperative of coordinated AIs as
services, and expounded on its ethical merits. By alleviating
current pains in AI and offering unique gains, acute market
needs are addressed, new opportunities are created, and eth-
ical issues plaguing the present state of AI are poised to be
largely rectified.
The long-term goals of SingularityNET are to (1) build a
new socio-economic engine; (2) correlate advancements to-
ward AGI with benevolence; (3) turn AI and AGI into a
global commons operated by an open-source framework
with democratic governance mechanisms; and (4) innovate
a fused ‘cognitive-economic’ logic foster “open-ended in-
telligence”, a “formative process of self-organization by
which intelligent agents are individuated” (Weinbaum and
Veitas, 2016). The founders aim for this system to have the
most beneficial and ethical impact on society possible and
for it to nurture the whole of humanity and sentient beings
for the most equitable relationship with AI.
A decentralized, distributed, and democratized AI would
foster the emergence of AGI, the Global Brain, and open-
ended intelligence, and with that pave a path for the appre-
hension of the farther reaches of human nature and potential,
such as non-ordinary consciousness (G. A. Montes, 2017b)
and outer space exploration and colonization (J. Montes,
2017; Montes, 2015). As decentralized and coordinated
AI/AGI develop in earnest, it may begin to exhibit proper-
ties of selfhood and agency that appear and/or behave in-
creasingly as humans and/or biological agents do, as per the
causal biomimetic process (G. A. Montes, 2017a). By de-
centralizing AI development, aggregation, and cooperation,
AI/AGI may be reached with a greater swath of humanity’s
capabilities considered, including humans’ more noble qual-
ities, leading to a more ethically sound synthetic and biohy-
brid landscape.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge the team members
of SingularityNET, who have contributed to the platform’s
design and execution and several of whom have collabo-
rated in previous work: David Hanson, Cassio Pennachin,
Simone Giacomelli, Eddie Monroe, Antonin Kolonin, Nil
Geisweiller, Linas Vepstas, Betelhem Dessie, Ruiting Lian,
and Alexey Potapov. Previous and ongoing work by the
OpenCog Foundation and Novamenta LLC have made Sin-
gularityNET possible.
Declarations of interest: None.
Funding: This research did not receive any specific grant
from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or
not-for-profit sectors.
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sciousness Expansion. ArXiv Prepr. ArXiv170907791. International Conference on Artificial Intelligence.
Goertzel, B., Pennachin, C., Mudado, M. de A., Coelho, L. de S., Springer, pp. 43–52.
2008. Identifying the genes and genetic interrelation-
ships underlying the impact of calorie restriction on
maximum lifespan: an artificial intelligence-based ap-
proach. Rejuvenation Res. 11, 735–748.
Goertzel, B., Pitt, J., Novamente, L.L.C., 2012. Nine ways to bias
open-source AGI toward friendliness. Nine 22, 1.
Goertzel, B.N., Pennachin, C., de Souza Coelho, L., Gurbaxani,
B., Maloney, E.M., Jones, J.F., 2006. Combinations of
single nucleotide polymorphisms in neuroendocrine ef-
fector and receptor genes predict chronic fatigue syn-
drome. Vitae
Goertzel, Z., 2017. Offer Networkds Simulation and Dynamics.
Gabriel Axel Montes is a cognitive neuroscience PhD Can-
MS Thesis University of Copenhagen, Computer Sci-
ence Dept. didate at the University of Newcastle (Australia). His work
Hanson, D., Mazzei, D., Garver, C., Ahluwalia, A., De Rossi, D., revolves on the cognitive neuroscience of bodily self-con-
Stevenson, M., Reynolds, K., 2012. Realistic humanlike sciousness, selfhood, their translation into/through technol-
robots for treatment of ASD, social training, and re- ogies such as artificial intelligence, virtual/augmented real-
search; shown to appeal to youths with ASD, cause ity, and blockchain, and the philosophical and ethical impli-
physiological arousal, and increase human-to-human
cations thereof. He is also the founder of Neural Axis, a con-
social engagement, in: Proceedings of the 5th ACM In-
ternational Conference on Pervasive Technologies Re- sultancy for applications involving the intersection of mind-
lated to Assistive Environments (PETRA’12). body entrainment and transformation with the above tech-
Heylighen, F., 2007. The Global Superorganism: an evolutionary- nologies. He received his MSc degree in Neuroscience &
cybernetic model of the emerging network society. Soc. Cognition from Utrecht University (Netherlands), where he
Evol. Hist. 6. researched the functional genetics and transcriptomics of
Hoppe, H.H., 2011. DemocracyThe God That Failed: The Eco- neurological disorders schizophrenia and autism.
nomics and Politics of Monarchy, Democracy, and Nat-
ural Order, Perspectives on Democratic Practice. Trans-
action Publishers. Ben Goertzel is the Chief Scientist and Chairman of Singu-
Kahn, J., 2017. DeepMind Goes to Alberta For First International larityNET, and the Chief Scientist of Hanson Robotics, a
Lab. Hong Kong robotics company that creates the world’s most
Kurzweil, R., 2010. The Singularity is Near. Gerald Duckworth & advanced humanoid robots. He also serves as Chairman of
Company. the Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) Society and the
Maturana, H.R., Varela, F.J., 1991. Autopoiesis and Cognition:
The Realization of the Living, Boston Studies in the
OpenCog Foundation, an organization leading international
Philosophy and History of Science. Springer Nether- development of advanced open source AI tools. He is the
lands. main architect and designer of the OpenCog system and is
Montes, G.A., 2017a. Causal biomimesis: self-replication as evo- one of the world’s foremost experts in AGI. He has held var-
lutionary consequence. Proc. Living Mach. Conf. ious executive roles at AI consulting and product develop-
Montes, G.A., 2017b. Non-ordinary consciousness for artificial ment firms and served in various faculty positions. He has
intelligence Proceedings of the Living Machines Con-
published nearly 20 scientific books and well over 100 sci-
ference.
Montes, J., 2017. ECOTOPE (Ecology-to-Orbit Platform Experi- entific research papers.
ment): Mirroring the Biosphere Across the Atmosphere.
Montes, J., 2015. The Mars Ice House.
Newman, J., 2017. Where Apple recruits its talent, according to
LinkedIn.
Odling-Smee, F.J., Laland, K.N., Feldman, M.W., 2003. Niche
construction: the neglected process in evolution. Prince-
ton University Press.
Shen, L., 2017. Former U.S. CTO: The “Robot Apocalypse”
Could Happen. Here’s How You Stop It.
Smigrodzki, R., Goertzel, B., Pennachin, C., Coelho, L.,
Prosdocimi, F., Parker, W.D., 2005. Genetic algorithm