In the world of machine learning, few experts are as prominent — or flashy, judging by his incredible leopard print hat — as Ben Goertzel, the Brazilian-American founder of the research group SingularityNET. Perhaps best known as the human mind behind Sophia the Robot, Goertzel is credited with popularizing the term “artificial general intelligence,” or AGI. Basically, the idea is that eventually we could see AI so sophisticated that it could achieve any intellectual task that a human could, or perhaps even vastly exceed the capabilities of a human. It’s a concept that some thinkers say could either bring about a utopian singularity and others fret could spell the start of the AI apocalypse. Regardless, the shockwaves of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other generative AI with unprecedented capabilities have led many to wonder if AGI is closer than they ever suspected. In a conversation with Futurism, Goertzel went deep on his views about consciousness — human, AI, and otherwise — the role of AI in copyright, and his experiences doing psychedelics with algorithms. This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity. Futurism: Where did you get the hat? Do you have more than one? Ben Goertzel: That’s top, top secret, classified information, not to be revealed until the singularity. Is AI at a level where it could “replace” humans yet, or are we close to that? I mean, I’m not sure what that phrasing means. Because I don’t think humans have replaced squirrels or cats for that matter, or the…Meet the AI Researcher Building His Own AGI