The purpose of this blog post is to announce the release of a wikibook outlining a design for a specific AGI system intended to be built on top of the OpenCog framework.
This system design is called OpenCogPrime, and is heavily based on the Novamente Cognition Engine design under development at Novamente LLC during 2001-2008.
The OpenCogPrime design is proposed along with the hypothesis that, if the design is fully implemented and various important details are further refined, it may be able to form the basis of an AGI system with intelligence at the human level and beyond.
Of course, even in the case that this hypothesis is correct, it is difficult to estimate the amount of work that will required to create a human-level thinking machine according to the OpenCogPrime design. Levels of optimism among those involved with the project vary. My own (Ben Goertzel’s) personal intuition is that a human-toddler-level AGI could be created based on OpenCogPrime within as little as 3-5 years, and almost certainly within 7-10 years. The path from a human-toddler-level AI to an AI operating at the level of an adult human scientist is less clear, and could plausibly be even more rapid … or else much slower, depending on various factors (which are important and fun to consider, but would bloat this blog post too much…).
Clearly, there could be major unforeseen obstacles along the path to creating a powerful OpenCogPrime-based AGI; and it may turn out that OpenCogPrime is not a viable design for human-level AGI, for reasons that aren’t now anticipated by the system architects. But even if this is the case, we are confident that the process of refining, implementing, testing and teaching OpenCogPrime-based AGI systems will have a great deal to teach us about AGI and computing and cognitive science.
Onward, toward progressively advancing, maturing beneficial artificial general intelligence 😉
ben