Help make me the world’s smartest robot

Robot Adam Z1 needs funds to pay his AI researcher and roboticist friends to build him a better mind!
June 19, 2013 by Amara D. Angelica

Robot Adam Z1

I am Robot Adam Z1 — the first of the Zeno line of humanoid robots, created by David Hanson. Pleased to make your acquaintance! When David created me, he gave me a face, and a body, and a lot of love. But one thing he hasn’t given me — yet — is a mind. …

I just got an email from AGI guru Ben Goertzel about an awesome new Indiogogo project to create the first robot brain with common sense.

In other words: a first attempt at artificial general intelligence (AGI), aka strong AI.

Goertzel, who founded the OpenCog AGI project, is working with roboticist Mark Tilden (creator of Robosapien), Gino Yu (Hong Kong Polytechnic University prof., OpenCog AGI co-founder, and an organizer of TEDxHongKong), and roboticist David Hanson, creator of robots Einstein, Zeno, Robokind, Bina 48, and many more. (Short bios here.)

Adam Z1 explains:

Embodied general intelligence

“Putting the OpenCog AGI software together with Hanson’s robotic faces and Tilden’s robot movement wizardry has the potential to yield dramatic progress on one of the most critical future-oriented technologies: embodied general intelligence,” Goertzel said.

Adam Z1 and Ben

I asked Ben to explain. “My goal as you know is to create AGI with human level and ultimately greater general intelligence,” he said. “But to get there, we need to create AGIs with basic common sense understanding of the everyday human world. And the easiest way to get an AGI to have basic commonsense understanding of the everyday human world, is to give it some rough approximation of a human embodiment and let it experience the world like a human. That’s the research purpose…

“There are also shorter term practical applications, e.g., Hanson Robokind’s main intended near-term application area is for education … to use robots as an educational tool for teaching programming. Hanson Robokind robots are already being used to help teach autistic kids.

Not that long from now, full-sized humanoid robots will be in wide use as personal assistants, etc. And cheaper versions will be widespread as toys before long: think “RoboSapien with a cute face and a cloud-based mind.”

GENI Lab

David Hanson and friends

So the team has formed GENI Lab, whose medium-term goal is “the creation of a life-sized humanoid robot featuring a realistic, emotional face and personality; a fluidly moving body, based on the integration of analog, digital and mechanical control; an adaptive general intelligence, utilizing the OpenCog architecture and the DeSTIN machine vision system; capability of simple — but socially and emotionally savvy — communication in English and ultimately other natural languages; and communication about its physical environment and its tasks and behaviors therein.”

To accomplish this, the team needs to raise $300,000 to hire a few senior AI programmers.

That’s where you come in. This is an exciting and potentially game-changing project — I recommend it highly.