The Singularity Summit 2010: Day One. Surfdaddy Orca August 15, 2010.
Singularity Summit 2010: Deep Thinking - (Build 20100722150226) Gadgets Published on August 17th, 2010 | by Greg For those unfamiliar with the term, we’ll be discussing the word Singularity in the context of futurism rather than astronomy.
Coined by Vernor Vinge and popularized by Ray Kurzweil, the term has come to mean the point at which technological progress exceeds our ability to keep up, rendering the future unpredictable in a variety of ways. One of the key notions is that, thanks to Moore’s Law, computing progress is exponential, and that we will likely reach a smarter-than-human artificial intelligence sometime within the next twenty years or so. It might sound a bit crazy- but we decided to dig a bit deeper, and attend the annual Singularity Summit, held last weekend in San Francisco. Our favorite talks were the last two. The summit itself took place over two days, though somewhat oddly for a fairly geeky convention, did not offer live streaming.
Singularity Summit 2010 in San Francisco to Explore Intelligence Augmentation. Kevin: I’ve been volunteering for the Singularity Institute these last few months.
Each year, the Singularity Institute hosts the Singularity Summit, a two-day conference in San Francisco this August that may be of interest to many of the readers of this blog. Will it ever become possible to boost human intelligence using brain implants, or create an artificial intelligence smarter than Einstein? In a 1993 paper presented to NASA, science fiction author and mathematician Vernor Vinge called such a hypothetical event a “Singularity“, saying “From the human point of view this change will be a throwing away of all the previous rules, perhaps in the blink of an eye”.
Vinge pointed out that intelligence enhancement could lead to “closing the loop” between intelligence and technology, creating a positive feedback effect. You can watch videos from past summits and register at www.singularitysummit.com. The Singularity Summit 2010 - (Build 20100722150226) Singularity Summit 2010: Human Health and Body Improvements Innovation Round-Up - (Build 20100722150226) First day of the Singularity Summit 2010 and first round-up of the last innovations and cutting-edge projects in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
The conferences focused more on demos and con crete applications, less on Theory. L’Atelier US was there. Human health and body improvement was a highly discussed subject today. Ben Goertzel, CEO of bioinformatics firm Biomind, talked about AI for increasing Human Health. Steve Mann, an eccentric inventor and professor at the University of Toronto, gave the most entertaining show.
Another inspiring idea shared by Steve Mann and his music team was his idea about addiction. A Selection of Singularity Summit 2010 Coverage - (Build 20100722150226) Singularity Summit 2010: No place for human values in a 'posthuman' future? It's day one at Singularity Summit 2010 being held at the Hyatt Regency in foggy San Francisco.
Gregory Stock, best-selling author--Redesigning Humans is a transhumanist classic--and biotech entrepreneur, took the stage this morning to offer his take on the coming singularity. Stock, who days earlier stepped down as CEO of Signum Biosciences, explained that he was going to provide a macro-evolutionary perspective on the controversial idea that we're in the midst of an evolutionary breakthrough where life starts taking control of its own evolution and machines eventually become smarter than their makers. But not so fast. "The things that people care most about move at a very slow pace.
For instance, where are all the wonder drugs we were promised 10 years ago? " THE SINGULARITY SUMMIT 2010 (day 1) - (Build 20100722150226) San Francisco, Hyatt Regency Six hundred very smart people sharing information on artificial intelligence (AI) versus the human mind--silicon versus biocarbon.
Can the biorevolution prevail? Interesting funding coming from the Defense Advanced Projects Agency. Tomorrow, a talk on the Future of Energy, plus The Great Randi. The focus of this weekend, though, is on biocarbon versus silicon versus consciousness into the future. Michael Vassar, President, Singularity Institute (The Darwinian Method) Archimedes was not science (it was progress by genius). Gregory Stock, Signum Biosciences (Evolution and the Posthuman Future) There has been an explosion of biota (four orders of magnitude in six years).
Evolutionary breakthroughs: creation of life 3.3 billion years ago and formation of multiple cells about a billion years ago. Ray Kurzweil, inventor, restless genius (The Mind and How to Build One) We are two decades from fully modeling and simulating the human brain. Patrick Takahashi: The Singularity Summit 2010 - (Build 20100722150226) Yes, the recession is now almost a memory, global climate warming is only somewhat impacting Russia and the price of crude oil is stabilized at $76/barrel.
Why then are there regular reports of doomsday around the corner? The Venus Syndrome (novel in process) is coming, and, remember that Mayan prophecy predicting the end in December of 2012. Worse, I'm involved in various virtual forums where a surprisingly high percentage of normally creditable academics fear the dual hammer of the Greenhouse Effect and Peak Oil crushing the world economy. Some actually have formed sustainable societies awating the culling of the world population from 7 billion to 1 billion. Pessimism is running rampant. Thus, it was refreshing and invigorating for me to experience unbounded optimism at the Singularity Summit gathering in San Francisco this past weekend.
Many of us are familiar with the term singularity with respect to mathematics and space. Said: 1. 2. 3. 4.