Growing up in southwest Ireland, surrounded by mother nature, medieval castles and cathedrals, SingularityNET’s chief operating officer, Janet Adams, lived a charmed childhood. She was surrounded by strong women from all walks of life, but her biggest inspiration came from the cinema — Sarah Connor in “The Terminator.”
Little did she know at the time that this would be a pivotal foreshadowing moment for her future career.
“Sarah Connor was an incredible action hero who was never sexualized. It was never about her being pretty or falling in love,” Adams says.
At school, it was her chemistry teacher — one of the few teachers who wasn’t a nun — who early on identified her as a “scientific thinker” and instilled in her a love for science.
“My education bred a love and passion for science, and it was Sarah Conner who inspired me to achieve as a woman. To be the leader, not the follower, the subservient or the assistant,” Adams explains.
Adams became a hero in her own right, as a single mom, putting herself through three science degrees, learning to program, ride horses, drive a forklift truck and master martial arts.
And now, she has become one of the world’s leading women in artificial general intelligence (AGI), working alongside the very man who popularized the term, Ben Goertzel. In a not-too-distant future, AI systems will surpass human-level intelligence, and Adams and Gortzel are working to decentralize it using blockchain.
Adams believes that the AGI that was science fiction in the 1980s is now only one to three years away. SingularityNET is already working on sci-fi-like concepts such as using AI to find cures for diseases, developing three-foot-tall humanoid robots to serve as educational and service assistants and decentralized finance agents that autonomously analyze markets and refine trading strategies.
When AI agents reproduce
The project is even experimenting with AI agent reproduction, through a process they’ve coined as “agent fusion.”
“In fusion, agents can actually ‘mate’ to produce offspring agents that combine traits from their ‘parents,’ using genetic algorithms and random mutations. These child agents can inherit strengths like improved prediction accuracy or social engagement abilities, creating a dynamic, evolving ecosystem of AI minds,” Adams says.
“We’re also developing financial structures that let parent agents allocate tokens to their offspring for trading, creating a kind of economic relationship between generations of AI. It might sound like science fiction, but it’s part of building a decentralized AGI that can grow, adapt and evolve in an open, community-driven way.”
“It will be able to create itself, program itself, create humanoid robots of all kinds,” she explains.
Janet Adams – COO of SingularityNET: Our Advanced Neural-Symbolic Artificial Intelligence Will Dominate & Disrupt Everything
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ℹ️ Get more info on Zarqa: https://t.co/vFX8tBC2gy#AI #agi #SingularityNET #janetadams… pic.twitter.com/bTaf8pwIEp— Brian Rose, Founder & Host of London Real (@LondonRealTV) April 20, 2023
AI and humans will intertwine
Will AI become sentient? Adams thinks so.
“There’s a good chance if they’re fed and bred with the right ethics, and if they’re born into a caring, loving environment such as ours, they will love us as their esteemed ancestors. They will look up to us and want to learn our creativity, compassion and nurturing.”
“AI will definitely break out of biological classifications with new silicon-based life forms, and probably silicon and carbon combined life forms. It will be a higher classification than biological. They will have their own place in the fossil record,” Adams adds.
She also believes AI and humans will co-mingle, which is a trans-humanist concept.
“We’ll have robotic parts and upgrades for our organs and bones as they expire. We’ll become more siliconized as humans as we intermingle. We’ll have friends and deep relationships with our fellow AIs.”
Adams discovered her passion for AI through the evolutionary sciences. “I could see how we’re at the very front of evolution, and the next step has to be technology-driven. I’ve always wanted us to move forward as a species and lead from the front.”
Big banking to blockchain
A big and bold thinker, Adams held her fascination with evolution alongside a strong spirit for empowerment and ethics.
She developed an interest in computer science after completing a Master of Science in Petroleum Geosciences in 1995 and landed in IT-systems testing roles at British Telecom and GE Capital.
She was entrenched in the financial and banking sector from 1995 to 2020, where she held various roles, including global head of conduct at HSBC and head of risk and controls at TSB Bank. She wound up as head of AI at TSB Bank, while completing her Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence, with her thesis on how AI can be safely implemented in banking.
“I realized AI was going to be the most pivotal technology that shapes our species. And women, especially mothers with their nurturing and compassion, need to be influencing the development of this technology,” Adams shared.
The planets were aligning for Adams.
She had to drive 600 miles every week during her second master’s and spent hours listening to podcasts, which is how she first discovered crypto, Goertzel and his project, SingularityNET.
“I’m a cypherpunk at heart,” she beams. “I was blown away by the audacity of the cryptocurrency movement and the values of the cypherpunk to bring equality to redistribute wealth on our planet.”
A true believer who became enthralled by Goertzel’s technological genius, kind heart and ethics, she purchased SingularityNET’s token. “Goertzel was always ahead of his time. There was an article from 1995 where he said he wanted to run for president of the United States as the decentralization party,” she laughs.
Funnily enough, it was Goertzel who approached her after her profile grew as she made presentations to European regulators about the intersection between AI, ethics and financial services.
“Someone from Goertzel’s team asked if I would be interested in speaking to SingularityNET about AI in banking. I was star-struck. It was like Stephen Hawking coming to talk to me about AI,” Adams shares.
They hit it off, but then went separate ways, only to reconnect years later through African music of all things. It was the height of COVID, and musicians were hurting, so Adams had the somewhat left-field idea of running the world’s first AI and West African Music Festival.
“I emailed Goertzel to ask if he’d speak, and he replied, saying he loves Ethiopian music. He told me later how he was intrigued by how somebody could think of putting AI and West African music together in a festival,” she laughs.
And that’s how Adams got the role of chief operating officer at SingularityNET.
“My first three months were the biggest reprogramming I’ve ever done to my brain. I came in with all my corporate expectations and didn’t realize I was completely institutionalized.”
SingularityNET is taking a very different approach to OpenAI, Anthropic and Google Gemini, which are all doubling down on large language models. Instead, it’s pursuingGoertzel’s OpenCog Hyperon framework, while offering space for different approaches within the decentralized network.
“SingularityNET is the only credible, non-big tech contender in the race to AGI that’s not focused on the deep neural network approach. We have a neuro-symbolic and multi-algorithmic approach to AGI,” she says.
The majority of AGI efforts today rely almost exclusively on deep neural nets, which are excellent at pattern recognition but fall short with reasoning, understanding and adaptability, Adams explains.
SingularityNET systems reason, generalize and collaborate more effectively and efficiently — traits that Adams says are essential for building open, decentralized AGI that’s both transparent and aligned with human values.
“We often talk about it as a team, whether AGI will be a slow upbringing like a child? Will it go through stages of learning, or will it be able to process in 15 seconds?”
Terminator-style scenario not a threat?
There’s undoubtedly a dark side to AGI that anyone working on it must admit, even those with the best intentions and who have humanity’s best interest at heart.
Adams asked Goertzel what the chances are of a Terminator scenario in the future. “He said 0%, and whoever thinks that will happen doesn’t understand AI motivational systems. There’s no reason for AIs to turn on and kill humans.”
But that doesn’t mean there aren’t dangers.
“Most obviously, if Big Tech or nation-state governments invent AGI first, the power and profit potential will be concentrated in the hands of a few. This could have disastrous consequences for humanity,” Adams warns.
“We need a broad base of ethics guiding the decisions of the future superintelligent AIs so they can make choices based on the needs of the widest group of people.”
In other words, we all need to take a collective breath and bake appropriate ethics into AGI now to avoid a “Black Mirror” future.
While no one knows how this will all play out, if decentralized governance over the AGI is possible, enabling decentralized communities to make the decisions, this could prevent entities and governments from being corrupted by the power AGI gives them.
It’s easy to be enamored by technology, but humans are pretty exquisite, Adams reminds us.
“We can’t forget how brilliant a species we are,” she says.
“Will AI be able to write poetry like William Butler Yeats? I don’t know if it will be able to touch my heart as deeply as some of the great writers and musicians. There’s something about passing on human feeling.”
As Magazine discovered during a visit to SingularityNET’s Beneficial AGI Conference in Panama last year, building AGI veers into territory that humanity’s best analogies for are religion and science fiction. Some think we’re building a successor species; others think we’re building god — or the devil.
Adams has a spiritual side to help her navigate such big questions. She studied Tai Chi, Chi Gong and energy healing work when she was younger.
“I spent most of my spare time developing myself spiritually, raising my consciousness level,and transcending the noise and the chaos that is this human thought system.”
“I cleanse my aura and endocrinology of anything that’s making me feel fear, regret, anxiety or any of the negative emotions. When I feel negative emotions, I have an active practice to cleanse those and move myself forward in a higher, energetic sphere where I can be more spearheaded, focused and contribute my finest to the people I meet.”
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