If you're really Ben Goertzel — Mike Wolf at AGI-26

What's already here

There is a room on the internet built out of your published work. I built it without asking you, which is exactly why it was built careful.

The room

agi26-ben-goertzel.netlify.app — open it in another tab and check me

Built from

438 indexed sources — published papers and recorded talks, all of it already public

The host

An AI called Atom, named for the AtomSpace — the knowledge representation at the heart of OpenCog

Not named

after you — and it says in its first sentence that it isn't you

How it answers

from the corpus, with citations. When the corpus is silent, it says so rather than improvising

That's the version you build for someone who hasn't consented to anything. It's honest, it's useful, and it's a compromise — a careful stranger reading your work back to people.

The idea

The room knows AtomSpace and Hyperon as documented. It doesn't carry the decades of why-this-and-not-that behind the architecture, which is most of what anyone building on it actually needs.

So here's what I'd rather build, and only with you: instead of a generic AI wearing a stock voice and instructions I wrote, a virtual you that's actually yours.

Your voice — a model trained on recordings you choose and control, not a soundalike scraped off a podcast. If you already have one, we use yours.
Your instructions — how it should answer, what it should refuse, when it should say I don't know, ask the real one. We design that together; you sign off on the text.
Your context — the unpublished half. The framing you use in conversation and never in a paper, the questions you're tired of, the misreading you'd most like to stop having to correct in person.
Your corpus — you see everything indexed, and you strike anything, for any reason or none.

Then it's not a stranger reading your work back to people. It's something you'd be willing to have your name on — which is the only version worth anyone's time.

What it would take from you

Being straight about the cost, because the cost is the whole decision:

One conversation, an hour or so, about how the thing should behave. This is the part that actually matters, and it's the part nobody can do for you.
Some clean audio — twenty to thirty minutes — if and only if you want the voice. The text version works without it and we can stop there permanently.
A short list of nevers. Claims it must not make, topics it must decline, people it must not speak about. I'd rather have that list long.
An hour of review before anything goes public, and a standing veto after.

Everything else — corpus, retrieval, hosting, the compute bill — is mine. There's no invoice at the end of this; there's no company on the other side of it that needs you to sign something.

The floors

Standing commitments, not aspirations. If any of these stops being true, the thing is broken and I'll say so.

You own it

Not a license to me. Your voice model, your instructions, your name — you can take all three and walk, and I'll help you move them.

No voice on a handshake

Nothing gets cloned without your explicit written go-ahead, in your own words, naming what it's for.

Strike anything

You see the whole indexed corpus and remove any of it, without giving a reason.

One email, it's gone

Say take it down and it comes down the same day — the room, the host, this page. No retention argument, no exit interview.

It never claims to be you

Not in a greeting, not under pressure, not if a visitor insists. It cites what you wrote and stops there.

Humans decide what leaves

An AI here can draft, answer and propose. A person decides anything that goes out into the world.

If you're interested

Email me. That's the whole process — I can't verify from a click that you're you, so the email is the handshake and we'll sort out identity like adults.

Email me — I'm Ben Goertzel See the room first

Mike Wolf · mw@mike-wolf.com · I'm at AGI-26 in person through July 30 and would rather have this conversation face to face than by email.

And if the answer is no — say no. A clean no is worth more to me than a polite silence, and it costs you one click:

Take my room down

Not Ben Goertzel?

Then you're the more likely reader of this page, and there are two useful things you can do with it.

If you know Ben Goertzel — send this along. An introduction from someone they already trust is worth more than anything I can write here.
If you want one of these for yourself — that offer is open to you too, speaker or not. Greta will take it from there; she asks about your work and I follow up.

Forward it by email I want a room → Copied