No one knows for sure what it’s going to take to make artificial general intelligence work. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t prominent research teams placing big bets on different theories: DeepMind seems to be hoping that a brain emulation strategy will pay off, whereas OpenAI is focused on achieving AGI by scaling up existing deep learning and reinforcement learning systems with more data, more compute.

Ben Goertzel —a pioneering AGI researcher, and the guy who literally coined the term “AGI” — doesn’t think either of these approaches is quite right. His alternative approach is the strategy currently being used by OpenCog, an open-source AGI project he first released in 2008. Ben is also a proponent of decentralized AI development, due to his concerns about centralization of power through AI, as the technology improves. For that reason, he’s currently working on building a decentralized network of AIs through SingularityNET, a blockchain-powered AI marketplace that he founded in 2017.

Ben has some interesting and contrarian views on AGI, AI safety, and consciousness, and he was kind enough to explore them with me on this episode of the podcast.