Ben Goertzel

Ben Goertzel (born 1966 in Rio de Janeiro) is an American cognitive scientist and AI researcher who did more than anyone to put the term “artificial general intelligence” into circulation, editing the 2005 book that gave the field its name. He leads the OpenCog open-source AGI project, served as chief scientist of Hanson Robotics — home of the robot Sophia — and in 2017 founded SingularityNET, a blockchain-based marketplace for AI services that in 2024 merged with Fetch.ai and Ocean Protocol to form the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance.

AGI for everyone, controlled by no one

Goertzel’s position is the mirror image of the pause movement: the danger is not building AGI, it is who owns it when it arrives. He has said he intends to roll out AGI in a decentralized, democratically controlled way rather than let it be controlled by any one person, corporation, or government — a network spanning dozens of countries instead of a hyperscaler’s server farm. In a 2025 interview he predicted AGI within two to seven years, said most jobs will vanish rapidly once it can do them, and called universal basic income almost inevitable in developed nations.

Skeptics note that Goertzel has forecast imminent AGI for decades, and that his crypto-token vehicle for funding it invites accusations of hype-surfing; his squirrels-in-Yellowstone vision of benevolent machine governance strikes doomers like Eliezer Yudkowsky as exactly the complacency they warn about. Goertzel’s answer is consistent: the singularity is coming regardless, so the only real choice is between decentralized AGI and AGI owned by a handful of corporations.