I watched a presentation yesterday made by Ben Goertzel on the topic of what the future might look like when Artificial General Intelligence will be created and our place in it.
For those who don't know who Goertzel is...
He's definitely not that. :-)
A tl:dr version is that he's a mathematician and researcher that has been working in the AI field for about 25 years. Some might also call him a futurist and transhumanist. Whatever that means nowadays.
Ben Goertzel is Chief Scientist of financial prediction firm Aidyia Holdings and robotics firm Hanson Robotics; Chairman of AI software company Novamente LLC, which is a privately held software company; Chairman of the Artificial General Intelligence Society and the OpenCog Foundation; Vice Chairman of futurist nonprofit Humanity+; Scientific Advisor of biopharma firm Genescient Corp.; Advisor to the Singularity University; Research Professor in the Fujian Key Lab for Brain-Like Intelligent Systems at Xiamen University, China; and general Chair of the Artificial General Intelligence conference series, an American author and researcher in the field of artificial intelligence. He was the Director of Research of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (formerly the Singularity Institute).
At the end of the presentation he talks a little about one of the projects he's currently working on called SingularityNet.
In his own words:
It's a blockchain based globally distributed marketplace for AIs and the idea is that anyone can basically upload an AI or upload an AI on their own server and wrap it in our interface which is a set of smart contracts and then anyone who wants AI services can access this global distributed network. Now this doesn't in itself feed starving children, but it does provide a global marketplace where a clever AI developer anywhere in the world can insert their AI in this global marketplace and if the thing succeeds it can reach customers from anywhere who want AI services. And a certain percentage of the profit generated in this network is then donated to benefit projects that use AI and other technologies to help the needy in the world.
I did a quick search for SingularityNet but nothing much came up so I guess it's still in development.
It seems though that TaaS has invested a more than decent amount of money in it so maybe that's something to look in and to follow.
/insert "this is not financial advice" here