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The year is 2024, and AI is all around us. From Nvidia, an AI software company that has become America’s third-most valuable firm with its new AI chip, to advanced breast cancer screening, AI is seeping into all facets of modern life.

This is an incredibly exciting time for humanity as we push the boundaries of what has already been done and explore where AI can take us next.

But what is the next stage? Many experts believe there will be a tipping point, where we will create a “technological singularity”.

This is the moment when computers can outsmart humans, meaning there will be new opportunities, as well as risks, for society.

This is also known as artificial general intelligence (AGI), a term popularised by Dr Ben Goertzel. Goertzel believes this could happen as early as 2027 due to the current rate of progress within the market, so it won’t be long before we see this new era come to fruition.

Unlike the narrow AI we are using in the industry at the moment, AGI will have the ability to take knowledge from one setting and apply it to others in a way that much closer mimics human behaviour.

As such, the emergence of AGI promises to be transformative for society at large. In fact, if we truly consider the wide-ranging applications of AGI, it has the potential to be one of the best things that has ever happened to society.

But how close are we, and what does this mean for humanity as a whole?

What has been done to date?

Currently, scientists are exploring a wide variety of methods to develop AGI, as there is no set way we will see this enter society. Different organisations and individuals have different techniques, and there is no real right or wrong, it will just be about who can create this first.

One approach focuses on the cognitive level, which means analysing how human brain networks function and then recreating these processes from a technological perspective. This means building a cognitive model from the ground up with as close accuracy to human levels as we understand.

A different way of working towards AGI is more at the brain level, where scientists work on a complex, self-organising, nonlinear dynamical network based on our current understanding of the human brain.

Different responses to stimuli are then tested to see how close to true consciousness the scientists have achieved.

SingularityNET’s current work towards AGI is the result of years of research experience. At the moment we have a wide ecosystem of projects on our platform, all working towards different applications of AGI.

One such project is the neural-symbolic language learning model (LLM) Zarqa. This tool has the potential to surpass conventional LLMs, such as ChatGPT, and give users just a taste of what is to come as AGI comes closer; the positive applications and outcomes are limitless.

AGI’s impact on humanity

Understanding how humans differ from AGI systems is difficult because we have yet to understand what shape these will take. All the current research will soon birth a way forward, and we’ll understand much more about how AGI and humans can work together.

The impact on humans, however, can be predicted as the positives are already coming to light. Think of the insight AGI could share on solving climate change or help towards research for cancer cures. Already, Rejuve.Biotech is researching and is close to implementing AI in lung cancer screenings, and AGI could take this to the next level.

A caveat to this is that I believe that AGI needs to be in the hands of humanity at large — to be controlled by no one person or organisation and enjoyed by everyone.

We will need to move beyond the industrial age legacy systems that come with centralised power and put decentralisation at the heart of whatever comes next.

This will have a huge part in shaping what AGI means for humans, and how we can separate ourselves from the machine.

The truth is that there will be a moment in time when computers are going to be smarter than humans, and it’s coming sooner than experts believe.

Our mission at SingularityNET is that we are the organisation that develops AGI in the safest way possible so that it will improve everyone’s life.

We predict that AGI will resolve many of our modern societal issues, the possibilities are endless and I look forward to seeing where we go next on this journey.

Janet Adams is the Chief Operating Officer at SingularityNET.

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