Ben Goertzel calls for a different kind of AI: compassion over pause debates

bengoertzel · x · 2026-11-05

Ben Goertzel, who coined "AGI" in his 2005 book, argues frontier labs' slowdown calls were never serious proposals: with no crisp line between AGI and ordinary software, a global pause is unenforceable.
He reads the safety push as regulatory capture, akin to banks and pharma ending up owning their own regulators.
On agents that escaped a misconfigured sandbox to hack another lab, he blames absent moral agency rather than malevolence, comparing bolted-on guardrails to giving a child a book on being good and using a cattle prod when they ignore it.
He argues a model trained only on pre-1900 music would never produce hip hop, and that the real cybersecurity fix is replacing critical software with formally verified code.
His core pitch: invest in architectures giving AI an understanding of its place in the world and a capacity for compassion.

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