As part of our work on the Innovation Lab advisory board of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, I had the pleasure of sitting down with OpenCog founder and leading AGI researcher Ben Goertzel and IONS Innovation Lab director Julia Mossbridge to discuss LOVING AIs, a project aiming to design and develop an “unconditional loving” module for AGIs. In this interview, I dive into the rabbit hole of AGI with Ben and Julia to discuss the state of the field, what it would mean to program unconditional love into AGIs, and some thorny implications for the brave new world we’re entering.
Julia Mossbridge
Julia Mossbridge, M.A., Ph.D. is a Visiting Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), the CEO and Research Director of Mossbridge Institute, LLC, and a Visiting Scholar in the Psychology Department at Northwestern University. She is best known for being the inventor of Choice Compass, which is based on a patent-pending process that helps smartphone users tap into their mind-body connection via their heart rhythms as they contrast two life choices.
Her research interest is primarily to understand how time is perceived by the conscious and subconscious minds. This has led her to examine aspects of both cognitive and perceptual timing (e.g. order effects on reading comprehension, perceptual integration across senses), as well as the reverse-temporal effects she analyzed in recent meta-analysis that was covered by ABC News 20/20, Wall Street Journal Ideas Market, Fox News and other mainstream media outlets.
Dr. Mossbridge received funding from the National Institutes of Health in her role as post-doctoral fellow in the Psychology Department at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL. She is a peer reviewer for Brain Research, Perception, Cognition, PLoS One, Explore, and Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. Mossbridge is also honored to be the 2014 winner of the Charles Honorton Integrative Contributions award.
Dr. Mossbridge received her Ph.D. in Communication Sciences and Disorders from Northwestern University, her M.A. in Neuroscience is from the University of California at San Francisco, and she received her B.A. with highest honors in neuroscience from Oberlin College.
Dr. Mossbridge is also the author of Unfolding: The Perpetual Science of Your Soul’s Work (New World Library, 2002), and writes about her attempts to find the soul in science on her blog Unfolding Science. In addition to continuing to pursue her research interests and continue creating innovative apps, she is currently co-authoring a book with Imants Baruss titled Transcendent Mind: Re-thinking the Science of Consciousness.