The Singularity Institute Blog

Where to Find Us

The Singularity Institute has been extending its web and outreach presence these past two months. As always, you can find us at the SIAI homepage and at the SIAI blog.

Hip readers may want to follow us via Twitter (@singinst) or Facebook Causes. Recently, we have set up a Crowdrise crowdsourcing and crowdfunding account for volunteers and fellows and a YouTube channel to host our collection of videos – with a few future surprises.

New Leadership in the Visiting Fellows Program

The Institute’s team of Visiting Fellows is under new management. Former Visiting Fellow Jasen Murray replaced Anna Salamon as Program Manager of the Visiting Fellows Program, with Louie Helm serving as his Deputy Program Manager.

Anna Salamon spent the past year managing the expanding Visiting Fellows Program. Freed from logistics and management, she aims to spend more time on her duties as a Research Fellow, writing research papers and engaging Visiting Fellows and other visiting academics in relevant research. She is also helping Visiting Fellows develop their rationality and their understanding of the existential risks landscape through individual tutoring and group workshops.

Jasen Murray founded the New York Less Wrong meet-up group and spent two years researching gene therapy and personalized medicine before joining the Visiting Fellows Program. His focus as program manager is on identifying individuals’ unique strengths, and on creating the institutions and skills that can let Fellows coordinate well, build effective teams, and get their strengths in contact with academic research, IA projects, and other action toward a positive Singularity.

Louie Helm is the founder of the Seventeen or Bust distributed computing project and an internet entrepreneur. As Deputy Program Manager, he manages programming projects, outreach projects, grant writing, and team-building for the Visiting Fellows. Louie also manages the SIAI volunteer program and is always looking for more online volunteers to assist SIAI in its various projects: reach him at louie.helm@singinst.org.

FQXi Grant Proposals Submitted

SIAI submitted three grant proposals for a total of $183,000 to the Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi). FQXi allocates grants to research projects that it believes will tackle “questions at the foundations of physics and cosmology, particularly new frontiers and innovative ideas integral to a deep understanding of reality but unlikely to be supported by conventional funding sources.”

These grants, if awarded, would allow SIAI to fund research in several topics of longstanding interest. Among these topics are a developed timeless decision theory (TDT) that can be viewed as a proper alternative to causal decision theory (CDT), an exploration of fundamental priors and the mechanics of the Universal Distribution with Absolute Self-Sampling Assumption (UDASSA), and the implications of the simulation hypothesis on cosmology and fundamental physics.

New Program Manager Jasen Murray has promised that the institution’s grant-writing project will be the first of many whole-team projects within the Visiting Fellows program. Discussed possibilities for the future are an electroencephalograph-building (EEG) project, a book planning project, and various IA experiments.

Research: ECAP Papers and Presentations

SIAI continues to contribute to the field of AI safety and to exchange dialogue, via published papers and presentations, with other scholars and students in the field. These past two months have been particularly busy with academic work.

Carl Shulman (currently in Australia) gave two academic presentations on what the evolution of intelligence implies about the feasibility of AI, with special attention devoted towards anthropic arguments. The first was an hour-long talk at the Australian National University; the second was a conference talk at the Association of Australian Philosophers.

The European Conference on Computing and Philosophy (ECAP) accepted Anna Salamon’s newest conference paper, written in conjunction with Research Fellow Steve Rayhawk and Visiting Fellow Janos Kramar, “How Intelligible is Intelligence? Implications for AI Development Trajectories.” In this paper, they propose that one factor that can usefully constrain models of AI development and takeoff trajectories is the “intelligibility of intelligence”—the extent to which efficient algorithms for general intelligence follow from simple general principles, as in physics, rather than being necessarily a conglomerate of special case solutions.

Visiting fellow Kaj Sotala also had his conference paper, “From Mostly Harmless to Civilization-Threatening: Pathways to Dangerous Artificial Intelligences,” accepted by ECAP. Kaj’s paper discusses the threat level of three possible pathways for AI development: through advanced hardware capabilities, through the capability of software self-improvement, and through multiple copies of a digital AI. He will be editing his completed paper the following month in his native Finland.

Three additional SIAI-affiliated papers have been accepted by ECAP: Anders Sandberg and Carl Shulman’s “Implications of a Software-Limited Singularity”; Steven Kaas, Peter Salamon, and Steve Rayhawk’s “Economic Implications of Software Minds”; and Joshua Fox and Carl Shulman’s “Superintelligence Favors Cooperation, but not Benevolence.” Steven Kaas is an alumnus of the summer 2009 Visiting Fellows program, Carl Shulman continues to work on SIAI research and projects in Australia, and Joshua Fox is a long-time supporter of SIAI and of efforts to create a positive Singularity.

Michael Anissimov’s presentation proposal “Public Scholarship for Global Catastrophic Risks” was accepted by the Society for Risk Analysis conference, to be held in Salt Lake City in December.

The Visiting Fellows Program: Bigger, Faster, Better!

The SIAI Visiting Fellows Program has grown over the past two months. Since the beginning of June, seven new Visiting Fellows have entered through the doors of the program: Peter de Blanc, Dennis Fan, Shaneal Manek, Frank Adamek, Abraham Wolk, Tim Czech, and Stanislas Sochacki. We expect to welcome eight more fellows over the course of the summer.

Currently, the new fellows are filming a Less Wrong lecture series, assisting in SIAI outreach efforts, and spending time learning from the Visiting Fellows curriculum. For more information on each individual fellow and his/her interests, visit the Visiting Fellows page.

Next time…

Look forward to more exciting developments from SIAI in the following newsletter… a Less Wrong YouTube lecture series is in the works by Visiting Fellows Peter de Blanc, Dennis Fan, and Frank Adamek… and even more Visiting Fellows will be trickling in.

Chris Peterson, a friend and advisor of SIAI, is holding a personalized life extension conference on October 9-10 at the San Francisco Airport Marriott. Readers of SIAI blog can get $100 off on registration by using the registration code “SIAI”. Here’s the short summary of the purpose of the conference:

Advances are being made daily on what each of us can do NOW to slow the aging process to a minimum, and to delay or prevent the diseases of aging.

Life extension news comes out faster than any one of us can evaluate it on our own. Let’s get together and determine how to take personal action.

Speakers include Esther Dyson, Peter Thiel, Terry Grossman, Bruce Ames, Gregory Benford, Patri Friedman, Sonia Arrison, Greg Fahy, and many more.

Register now if you’re interested, and get psyched up for what is certain to be a life-affirming conference…

The first ever Singularity Summit Australia will be held on September 7th, 11th, and 12th at Casey Plaza at RMIT, Melbourne. Here’s the news release:

Singularity Summit 2010 in Melbourne Victoria to explore emerging technological trends
Speakers include AI Architect Hugo deGaris, Futurist Peter Ellyard

Melbourne Victoria 2010 — Will it be one day 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.

This September 7th, 10-12th, hundreds of AI researchers, robotics experts, philosophers, entrepreneurs, scientists, and interested laypeople will converge in Melbourne to address the Singularity and related issues at the only conference on the topic in Australia, the Singularity Summit. Experts in fields including artificial intelligence, bio-ethics, tissue regeneration, medical ethics, computational neurobiology, cryonics, futurism, and more will share their latest research, brightest ideas, and explore their implications for the future of humanity.

“This is the first Singularity Summit outside the US, and will be a great event,” said Adam Ford, coordinator of the Singularity Institute Australia, which is hosting the event.

Russell Blackford, editor of “50 Voices of Disbelief” who is a contributor to IEET, will explore the ethical and practical implications of key emerging technological trends. Futurist Peter Ellyard will discuss opportunities that innovation and technology can provide and his book ‘Designing 2050′.

Interested readers can watch videos from past summits and register at http://summit.singinst.org.au.

Only 19 hours left until the Summit kicks off, and we are almost sold out of seats! Register now, if you haven’t yet, to ensure a seat.

There are also still slots available for our Meet & Mingle with the Summit Speakers event on Saturday night.

For those who have registered, see you at the Hyatt tomorrow!

On the evening of Saturday, August 14th, join us for exciting discussions with Summit Speakers at a cocktail reception hosted by the Singularity Institute. This event will feature the opportunity to meet with speakers at the 2010 Singularity Summit, the world’s premier conference on the technological Singularity, held in San Francisco on August 14th and 15th. The meeting will be held at the Infinity Towers in San Francisco. Tickets are limited to 70. For more information, contact Singularity Institute COO Amy Willey at amywilley@singinst.org. Register today!

Registration link: http://meetss10speakers.eventbrite.com/

The Singularity Summit 2010 is almost here! The full schedule has been posted on the website. Here it is:

Day 1: The Future of Human Evolution

8:00 AM - 9:00 Registration starts. Breakfast served outside the hotel by Boudin
9:00 - 9:05 Sean McCabe: Introduction
9:05 - 9:40 Michael Vassar: The Darwinian Method
9:45 - 10:25 Gregory Stock: Evolution of Post-Human Intelligence
10:25 - 11:00 Coffee Break
11:00 - 12:00 Ray Kurzweil: The Mind and How to Build One
12:05PM - 12:40 Ben Goertzel: AI Against Aging
12:40 - 2:10 Lunch: Served by Boudin Outside the Hotel
2:10 - 2:45 Steven Mann: Extending Ourselves with Technology
2:50 - 3:20 Mandayam Srinivasan: Replacing Our Bodies
3:25 - 4:10 Brian Litt: The Past, Present and Future of Brain Machine Interface
4:15 - 4:45 Demis Hassabis: Machine Learning is Rapidly Discovering How the Brain Works
4:50 - 5:15 Coffee Break
5:20 - 5:45 Terry Sejnowski: Reverse-Engineering Brains is Within Reach
5:50 - 6:15 Dennis Bray: What Cells Can Do That Robots Can’t
6:15 - 7:00 Sejnowski/Bray Debate: Will We Soon Realistically Emulate Biological Systems?
7:00 PM Closing

Day 2: Why and How We Should Solve the World’s Problems

9:00AM - 9:35 Eliezer Yudkowsky: Simplified Humanism and Positive Futurism
9:40 - 10:15 Ramez Naam: The Digital Biome
10:15 - 10:40 Coffee & Bagels served by Boudin (see directions and map)
10:40 - 11:10 Lance Becker: Modifying the Boundary Between Life and Death
11:15 - 11:45 Ellen Heber-Katz: The MRL Mouse - How It Regenerates and How We Might Do the Same
11:50 - 12:35 Anita Goel: Rapid Diagnostics and Sensing with Nanofluidics
12:35PM - 2:00 Lunch Served by Boudin outside the hotel (see the map)
2:00 - 2:35 Shane Legg: Universal Measures of Intelligence
2:40 - 3:15 John Tooby: General Intelligence and Narrowly Intelligent Modules
3:20 - 4:00 Tooby, Goertzel, Yudkowsky & Legg panel: “Narrow and General Intelligence”
4:00 - 4:25 Break
4:25 - 4:55 David Hanson: Emotionally Intelligent Machines
5:00 - 5:30 Joseph Tsien: Deciphering Memory Code in the Brain
5:35 - 6:10 Irene Pepperberg: Nonhuman Intelligence: Where We Are and Where We’re Headed
6:15 - 7:00PM James Randi: Is There Such Thing as Scientific Consensus?

Are you interested in reducing existential risk? Are you a student who wants to donate to existential risk reduction, but doesn’t have any money? Are you a past or present Visiting Fellow applicant? Do you want to apply to the Visiting Fellows program, but can’t take time off work or school? If the answer to any one of these questions is yes, you should join the Singularity Institute Volunteer Program. The Singularity Institute is looking for volunteers to do things like:

- Review and proofread SIAI publications.
- Promote SIAI sites like singinst.org and lesswrong.com.
- Contribute content to the SIAI Blog.
- Create online videos or other digital content.
- Volunteer for the 2010 Singularity Summit.
- Organize monthly dinner parties to cultivate new supporters.
- Translate SIAI webpages into other languages, e.g. French, German, Japanese, Mandarin, Spanish, etc.
- Contribute to the collaborative rationality blog Less Wrong.
- Host a Less Wrong meetup, or remind organizers to host them.

Requirements for volunteers are fairly minimal, but you must be able to:

- Read and write English on a basic or higher level
- Complete tasks reliably with minimal supervision
- Stick to deadlines, and let us know if you can’t meet them

Additional skills, like programming, ability to write well, foreign languages, math talent, etc. are a definite plus. If you are interested, please shoot us an email with a brief summary of who you are, what your interests and skills are and how you’d like to help.

If you want to contribute, but don’t know how you can help, please email SIAI Volunteer Coordinator Louie Helm at louie.helm@singinst.org.

If you already have a project or projects that you think might be relevant to reducing existential risks, please email SIAI Visiting Fellow Thomas McCabe at tom.mccabe@singinst.org.

Apply today!

We’ve added John Tooby, the founder of evolutionary psychology, to our excellent roster for this upcoming August 14-15 conference at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco, along with Ramez Naam, author of More Than Human.

For those interested in technology and science, this is a star-studded roster. I’ve listed them before on this blog, but let me mention a few of the highlight speakers yet again: Ray Kurzweil, author of The Singularity is Near, the “world’s first cyborg” Stephen Mann, animal intelligence pioneer Irene Pepperberg, leading bionanotechnologist Dr. Anita Goel, bioethicist Gregory Stock, computational neurobiologist Terry Sejnowski, creator of the world’s most realistic humanoid robots, David Hanson.

Register now, and save $200 on the at-the-door price.

https://www.singularitysummit.com/registration/

We also still have discounted hotel rooms available at the Hyatt.

See you in San Francisco! This will be one of the best science/technology conferences ever.

There only a week to register for our conference before the price goes up again — right now it is $485. Students get $100 off. For every non-student you refer who signs up, you get an additional $100 off, with no limit. How do referrals work? Get your friend to sign up, then email me, and I’ll send you a special discount code. There are also major discounts on hotel reservations, if you hurry — Hyatt rooms are available for the special rate of $139 — much less than the usual $199.

Why is the Singularity Summit important? I wrote up some longer thoughts on that at my personal blog, but the basic answer is that the Singularity Summit is truly a uniquely valuable conference — there isn’t anything else like it for science, technology, and futurism thinkers. Few conferences have top scientific experts from so many varying fields: Artificial Intelligence, robotics, computational neuroscience, brain-computer interfaces, nanobiotechnology, augmented reality, regenerative medicine, and a lot more. If you attend, you will find that this is the most intellectually stimulating conference you’ve attended all year, and with some of the best networking in one of the hottest innovation zones on the planet.

This year’s Singularity Summit will be held on August 14-15 at the San Francisco Hyatt Regency. Speakers include:

Ray Kurzweil, inventor, futurist, author of The Singularity is Near
James Randi, renowned skeptic and debunker, founder of the James Randi Educational Foundation
Dr. Anita Goel, a leader in the field of bionanotechnology, Founder & CEO, Nanobiosym, Inc.
Dr. Irene Pepperberg, leading investigator of animal intelligence, trainer of the African Grey Parrot “Alex”
Prof. Alan Snyder, Director, Centre for the Mind at the University of Sydney, researcher in brain-computer interfaces
Prof. Steven Mann, augmented reality pioneer, professor at University of Toronto, “world’s first cyborg”
Dr. Gregory Stock, bioethicist and biotech entrepreneur, author of Engineering Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future
Dr. Ellen Haber-Katz, a professor at the Wistar Institute who studies rapid-regenerating mice
Joe Z. Tsien, scholar at the Medical College of Georgia, who created a strain of “Doogie Mouse” with twice the memory of average mice
Eliezer Yudkowsky, research fellow with the Singularity Institute
Michael Vassar, president of the Singularity Institute
David Hanson, CEO of Hanson Robotics, creator of the world’s most realistic humanoid robots
Demis Hassabis, research fellow at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at the University of London

…and many others. We hope to see you in San Francisco on August 14th!

The Singularity Summit 2010 features a variety of discounts for registration, including $100 off for students and $100 off for every non-student referral. However, the greatest discounts are for registering early — there is a $300 discount off the at-the-door cost of the conference if you register by midnight tonight, Monday the 7th. After that, there will only be a $200 discount until July 1st, and a $100 discount until August 1st. If you register now, you can get your ticket for $385, or $285 if you’re a student or make a referral. There is no limit on discounts for non-student referrals, so you can refer multiple people for an even greater discount. See you August 14-15 for this exciting conference at the San Francisco Hyatt!