Thanks, Nate!
Indeed, the first few minutes are missing, probably due to a video setup problem... and the audio is a bit sketchy (as you note) during the first few minutes, but then corrects.
Ben and I had a great time visiting Google, especially meeting Peter Norvig, Google's Dir of Research. I think we came away with a better understand of Google's position regarding AGI... which seems to be quite minimal at current, but one can never be 100% sure. I'm basing my assessment on Peter's reply and funny comment he made at the beginning of Ben's talk... so it doubly sucks that the video starts a bit late. Oh well... maybe next time.
Ben's recollection of the intro... as relayed to the Novamente team:
Earlier this week, I was giving a talk at Google, about artificial general intelligence, and Peter Norvig (Google's Director of Research) gave the intro. I had talked to him earlier; and mentioned to him that some folks I knew suspected Google to have a top-secret AGI project. So he gave the following intro (paraphrasing):
"There has been some talk about whether Google has a top-secret project aimed at building a thinking machine. Well, I'll tell you what happened. Larry Page came to me and said 'Peter, I've been hearing a lot about this Strong AI stuff. Shouldn't we be doing something in that direction?' So I said, okay. I went back to my desk and logged into our project management software. I had to write some scripts to modify it because it didn't go far enough into the future. But I modified it so that I could put, 'Human-level intelligence' on the row of the planning spreadsheet corresponding to the year 2030. And, that wasn't up there an hour before someone else added another item to the spreadsheet, time-stamped 90 days after that: 'Human-level intelligence: Macintosh port'" ;-)
- Ben Goertzel
Ben's blog post on Norvig's intro:
http://blog.outer-co...-06-02.html#n28