The Singularity Institute Blog

SAN JOSE, CA, August 29, 2008 – Singularity Summit 2008: Opportunity, Risk, Leadership takes place October 25 at the intimate Montgomery Theater in San Jose, CA, the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence announced today. Now in its third year, the Singularity Summit gathers the smartest people around to explore the biggest idea of our time: the Singularity.

Keynotes will include Ray Kurzweil, updating his predictions in The Singularity is Near, and Intel CTO Justin Rattner, who will examine the Singularity’s plausibility. At the Intel Developer Forum on August 21, 2008, he explained why he thinks the gap between humans and machines will close by 2050. “Rather than look back, we’re going to look forward 40 years,” said Rattner. “It’s in that future where many people think that machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence.”

“The acceleration of technological progress has been the central feature of this century,” said computer scientist Dr. Vernor Vinge in a seminal paper in 1993. “We are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. The precise cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence.”

Singularity Summit 2008 will feature an impressive lineup:

• Dr. Ruzena Bajcsy, pioneering AI and robotics researcher
• Dr. Eric Baum, AI researcher, author of What is Thought?
• Marshall Brain, founder of HowStuffWorks.com, author of Robotic Nation
• Dr. Cynthia Breazeal, robotics professor at MIT, creator of Kismet
• Dr. Peter Diamandis, chair and CEO of X PRIZE Foundation
• Esther Dyson, entrepreneur, investor, philanthropist
• Dr. Pete Estep, chair and CSO of Innerspace Foundation
• Dr. Neil Gershenfeld, director of MIT Center for Bits and Atoms, author of Fab
• Dr. Ben Goertzel, CEO of Novamente, director of research at SIAI
• John Horgan, science journalist, author of The Undiscovered Mind
• Ray Kurzweil, CEO of Kurzweil Technologies, author of The Singularity is Near
• Dr. James Miller, author of forthcoming book on Singularity economics
• Dr. Marvin Minsky, one of AI’s founding fathers, author of The Emotion Machine
• Dr. Dharmendra Modha, cognitive computing lead at IBM Almaden Research Center
• Bob Pisani, news correspondent for financial news network CNBC
• Justin Rattner, VP and CTO of Intel
• Nova Spivack, CEO of Radar Networks, creator of Twine semantic-web application
• Peter Thiel, president of Clarium, managing partner of Founders Fund
• Dr. Vernor Vinge, author of original paper on the technological Singularity
• Eliezer Yudkowsky, research fellow at SIAI, author of Creating Friendly AI
• Glenn Zorpette, executive editor of IEEE Spectrum

Registration details are available at http://www.singularitysummit.com/registration/.

About the Singularity Summit

Each year, the Singularity Summit attracts a unique audience to the Bay Area, with visionaries from business, science, technology, philanthropy, the arts, and more. Participants learn where humanity is headed, meet the people leading the way, and leave inspired to create a better world. “The Singularity Summit is the premier conference on the Singularity,” Kurzweil said. “As we get closer to the Singularity, each year’s conference is better than the last.”

The Summit was founded in 2006 by long-term philanthropy executive Tyler Emerson, inventor Ray Kurzweil, and investor Peter Thiel. Its purpose is to bring together and build a visionary community to further dialogue and action on complex, long-term issues that may transform the world. Its host organization is the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization studying the benefits and risks of advanced artificial intelligence systems.

Singularity Summit 2008 partners include Clarium Capital, Cartmell Holdings, Twine, Powerset, United Therapeutics, KurzweilAI.net, IEEE Spectrum, DFJ, X PRIZE Foundation, Long Now Foundation, Foresight Nanotech Institute, Novamente, SciVestor, Robotics Trends, and MINE.

SIAI Director of Research Dr. Ben Goertzel will speak on the OpenCog Project on September 7th in Menlo Park, CA.

He will speak on OpenCog Prime, to be implemented in the OpenCog open-source AI software framework, sponsored by SIAI.

Link

SIAI Director of Research Dr. Ben Goertzel was interviewed by Stephen Euin Cobb on the award-winning podcast The Future and You.

Topics include Artificial General Intelligence, the singularity, and transhumanism.

SIAI Director of Research Dr. Ben Goertzel will run a weekly series of tutorial sessions on OpenCogPrime from September 2008 through January 2009.

Each session will center on a chapter of the OpenCog Wiki book.

This will enable OpenCog participants to better understand the OpenCogPrime design and provide feedback on the design and Wiki book.

Donate here to support “The Singularity” documentary

Independent filmmaker Doug Wolens is producing a feature-length documentary, “The Singularity.” The film is 80% shot, with editing about to begin. To complete the documentary in time for this year’s winter film festivals, Doug needs $45,000.

The Singularity Institute supports this documentary. We have made a sizable contribution toward final production and distribution costs. Now, we are collecting donations on Doug’s behalf to help get this vital work on screens around the world.

Doug Wolens is an experienced filmmaker who filmed Singularity Summit 2006 and 2007. He also produced, among other films, the documentary “Butterfly” about the environmental heroine, Julia Butterfly Hill.

Supporting the completion of this film supports our mission. We hope you will donate – 100% of all contributions underwrite the movie’s final costs, and are fully tax deductible through the Singularity Institute. Please, don’t miss this opportunity: support Doug’s documentary.

The Second Conference on Artificial General Intelligence will be held March 6-9, 2009 in Arlington, Virginia. The conference website AGI-09.org will give full details on the conference in its scientific and practical aspects. Registration opens October 1, 2008.

SIAI Director of Research Dr. Ben Goertzel is the Conference Chairman, and SIAI Director of Outreach Bruce Klein is on the Organizing Committee.

Earlier this year the OpenCog project was launched, with seed funding from SIAI and code and manpower donations from Novamente LLC. OpenCog is a free and open source software project aimed at providing a generic framework for the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI) software. The first formal code release is planned for Fall 2008, but the project has already gained considerable momentum. Most notably, through the Google Summer of Code project, Google Inc. has supported 11 student interns to work this summer on OpenCog-related projects. Several of these student projects have been extremely successful, yielding code and ideas that will form an important part of OpenCog going forwards.

Today another major step forward has been been taken, with an aim of pushing the OpenCog project in the direction of truly powerful AGI: the release of a wikibook outlining a design for a specific AGI system intended to be built on top of the OpenCog framework. This system design is called OpenCogPrime, and is heavily based on the Novamente Cognition Engine design under development at Novamente LLC during 2001-2008.

The OpenCogPrime design is proposed along with the hypothesis that, if the design is fully implemented and various important details are further refined, it may be able to form the basis of an AGI system with intelligence at the human level and beyond.

Of course, even in the case that this hypothesis is correct, it is difficult to estimate the amount of work that will required to create a human-level thinking machine according to the OpenCogPrime design. Levels of optimism among those involved with the project vary. My own (Ben Goertzel’s) personal intuition is that a human-toddler-level AGI could be created based on OpenCogPrime within as little as 3-5 years, and almost certainly within 7-10 years. The path from a human-toddler-level AI to an AI operating at the level of an adult human scientist is less clear, and could plausibly be even more rapid … or else much slower, depending on various factors (which are important and fun to consider, but would bloat this blog post too much…).

Clearly, there could be major unforeseen obstacles along the path to creating a powerful OpenCogPrime-based AGI; and it may turn out that OpenCogPrime is not a viable design for human-level AGI, for reasons that aren’t now anticipated by the system architects. But even if this is the case, we are confident that the process of refining, implementing, testing and teaching OpenCogPrime-based AGI systems will have a great deal to teach us about AGI and computing and cognitive science.

Those of us involved with OpenCog are extremely excited about the power of the free and open source development methodology for accelerating progress toward safe, beneficial AGI with intelligence at the human level and beyond. As in the case of Linux and other existing free and open source software projects, there is the opportunity for industry, academia and independent researchers and hobbyists to work together to create profoundly powerful software.

AGI ethics is (of course) at the core of SIAI’s mission, and we are dedicated to pursuing OpenCog and OpenCogPrime development in an ethically sound way. The free and open source methodology has obvious risks attached to it, and also obvious benefits: there will be a great number of intelligent, educated, concerned people looking at the code as it develops, with an eye toward ethical as well as intelligence-level considerations. Assuming OpenCogPrime-based systems successfully achieve greater and greater levels of general intelligence, we are committed to studying, monitoring and experimenting with these systems carefully with a view toward rapidly increasing our theoretical as well as practical understanding of the ethical properties of AGI systems of the OpenCogPrime category.

Onward toward an ethical, beneficial, progressively advancing and maturing artificial general intelligence!

Singularity Summit 2008 has been scheduled officially for Saturday October 25th (changed from the week before). It will be held at the Montgomery Theater in San Jose.

Watch this blog for further details, coming soon.

SIAI Research Fellow Eliezer Yudkowsky spoke on “(Artificial) Intelligence: The Wild Card” at the Global Catastrophic Risks conference, sponsored by the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University.

Yudkowsky’s essays “Cognitive biases potentially affecting judgment of global risks” and “Artificial Intelligence as a Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk” will appear in the related book, Global Catastrophic Risks,” ed. Nick Bostrom and Milan Cirkovic (forthcoming, Oxford University Press, 2008).

Ronald Bailey covered the conference, including Yudkowsky’s talk, at Reason Magazine Online.

The Gazette, Montreal’s English-language newspaper, featured an article by David Sachs on the Singularity, “Survival of the Machines.”

The article mentions the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and cites SIAI Director Ray Kurzweil, Director of Research Dr. Ben Goertzel, and Research Fellow Eliezer Yudkowsky.

Along with it appeared a shorter item “Friendly AI: More than taming robots,” specifically about Friendly AI.