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.
