From: on behalf of Ben Goertzel <an To: Jeffrey Epstein <[email protected]> Subject: quick summary of situation Date: Mon, 17 Aug 2009 01:51:56 +0000 Hi, Thanks for taking the time to talk to me, amidst all your busy-ness... This is just a quick summary of the practical points we discussed at the end of the call. I just want to be sure the situation is clear to you. 1) Working on my own, I can make some progress toward AGI, but not very fast progress. So if I'm working on my own and don't have a team working with me, I'm more inclined to work on theory, with the goal of making my AGI design simpler and more robust, so it will be more effective and easier to implement once I have a team again. 2) If you were willing to fund say 2 or 3 others besides me, then we could keep making real engineering progress toward AGI. But this would cost more like $17-20K/month, significantly more than funding me. 3) If you don't want to fund some sort of ongoing "build a thinking machine" project, then I think my best career move is probably to return to academia. Funding my research via running a small AI consulting company just isn't working anymore. If I return to academia I'll keep Novamente operating on the side -- and try to sell the virtual pet engine to game companies, etc. -- but then I won't be relying on it for personal income. But given the academic hiring cycle, if I want to return to academia in September 2010, I need to apply in the December- January interval. I.e., there's a long lead time. Maybe I should have applied for academic jobs for September 2009, but that's water under the bridge. I didn't do so because I thought Dan Stoicescu would keep funding Novamente, but instead he disappeared and turned anti-AI, as I described to you ;-( 4) What would be *ideal* (short of you funding an ongoing AGI project ;-), would be willing to fund a one-year research fellowship, that I could use at a university live for the upcoming academic year.