Many of the chapters in this book began as articles for
the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemaine (FAZ). And so,
above all, as I put this book together, I found myself feeling
immensely grateful to Frank Schirrmacher, who is one of
the five publishers of the FAZ, and Jordan Mejias, the FAZ’s
New York arts editor. Without their ongoing support and
encouragement, I would never have produced the articles
on which much of this book is based, and so the book would
not exist.
For years before encountering FAZ, I had thought about writing
about science for a popular audience, but somehow I’d
never been able to do so in an effective way. By giving
me the opportunity to write for FAZ, Frank and Jordan gave
me a real audience to think about. Before, without this
real audience in mind, I’d struggled and struggled
with various strategies for simplifying and popularizing
my thinking and writing. Once they put the real audience
in front of me, everything just seemed to click. This is
particularly ironic since the real audience for the FAZ
articles consisted of people reading my articles in translation,
in a language I do not read or speak or understand!
I’m also particularly grateful to my father Ted Goertzel,
who spent a goodly amount of time helping me struggle with
an earlier attempt at popularizing my ideas about Webmind.
Bits and pieces of the text we worked on together wound
up in a lot of places – some here, some in my last
research treatise Creating Internet Intelligence. Our manuscript
never quite gelled in a fully satisfying way, but the process
of building it was extremely instructive.
Stephan Bugaj and I also worked together on some popular and
technical articles on the subjects touched here; as an example, Stephan is co-author of Chapter 1 of the book. Numerous discussions with Stephan were important in shaping many of the ideas presented throughout the book.
Of course, beyond these acknowledgements that have to do
specifically with the text in this book, I have a huge number
of individuals to thank for helping me out with the scientific
and business pursuits that led me to investigate the topics
discussed here. At the top of the list are various Webmind
Inc. people, such as my Webmind Inc. co-founders Ken Silverman,
Lisa Pazer, Jeff Pressing and Onar Aam, my key Webmind Inc.
co-conspirators Cassio Pennachin and Stephan Bugaj, and
Webmind Inc. CEO and investor Andy Siciliano. The entire
Webmind Inc. staff actually deserves a great deal of gratitude,
but I won’t list them all here.
My mother Carol Goertzel, her brother Mike Zwell, my grandfather
Leo Zwell and my kids Zarathustra, Zebulon and Scheherazade
all deserve thanks for one reason or another. And my wife
Gwendolyn Aranya Chuan Kung Shakya Michele Goertzel, with
whom somehow I’m still together after 18 years of
adventures of the mind, body, heart and (nonexistent) soul….
There are those to whom I owe more recent debts: Jeffrey
Epstein whose research grant paid my salary in the academic year 2001-2002; Deepak Kapur
and Barak Pearlmutter who made it possible for me to use
Jeffrey’s grant to work at UNM. Most of this book was "pulled together" during February 2002, while I was under Jeffrey's sponsorship at UNM.
And finally, the Webmind Diehards, Cassio, Stephan, Thiago
Maia, Andre Senna, Guilherme Lamacie and Saulo Pinto, who
have helped me keep our Novamente AI project alive in these tough
economic times, and joined me on my recent ventures into
the realm of biocomputing. Their enthusiasm for AI, postgenomic
biology and future sci-tech in general matches my own, and has played a major role in impelling
me to explore the ideas described here.
