Humans take psychedelics. Should robots? | Ben Goertzel

Psychedelics are crude drugs. Could neuroscience and super-intelligent AI help us design something better? - The illegal status of psychedelic substances is a terrible thing, says Ben Goertzel. With everything happening behind closed doors, our societies are not developing the right set of cultural institutions to guide people in the productive use of psychedelics. - Once scientists have mastered artificial general intelligence (AGI), the psychedelic experience could be engineered for the modern world – it would be safer, less haphazard, and more meaningful. We would "trip" by jacking our brains into the superhuman AGI mind cloud. - "We're going to be exploring states of consciousness that go way beyond anything we can imagine now and way beyond anything that the very crude psychedelic drugs that exist allow us access to," Goertzel says. Ben Goertzel is CEO and chief scientist at SingularityNET, a project dedicated to creating benevolent decentralized artificial general intelligence. He is also chief scientist of financial prediction firm Aidyia Holdings and robotics firm Hanson Robotics; Chairman of AI software company Novamente LLC; Chairman of the Artificial General Intelligence Society and the OpenCog Foundation.His latest book is AGI Revolution: An Inside View of the Rise of Artificial General Intelligence (https://goo.gl/fuUXen) Read more at BigThink.com: http://bit.ly/2SA8U7w Follow Big Think here: YouTube: http://goo.gl/CPTsV5 Facebook: http://bit.ly/1qJMX5g Twitter: https://twitter.com/bigthink