Team Update

Executive Director Tyler Emerson:

• Rebranding process began in March, in collaboration with award-winning designer and MINE Founder Christopher Simmons, who is nearing completion of the initial research.
• Tyler began an update list for anyone to join who wants more regular updates on SIAI and the broader long term philanthropy community. Email “Updates - Yes” to emerson@singinst.org to join.
• In February, Tyler co-organized BIL, a free counterpoint to TED. Coverage included Wired and NPR. BIL2009 will be February 7th-8th in Long Beach.
• Beginning in May, SIAI Blog will be updated at least once every 10 days by volunteer Joshua Fox, focusing on SIAI activity and Friendly AI / AGI developments.
• Singularity Summit 2008 will be Saturday October 18th at Montgomery Theater in San Jose. We will have a more intimate summit with seating limited to 500. Details forthcoming.
• Singularity Summit 2007 videos (filmed, edited, and produced at a generously low-cost by independent filmmaker Doug Wolens) are online.

Director of Research Ben Goertzel, Ph.D.:

• Development on OpenCog began in February. Researchers in New Zealand and Brazil have been retained for the project.
• Director of Open Source Projects David Hart secured acceptance of OpenCog within Google’s Summer of Code program. Eleven summer interns paid by Google will work on OpenCog code.
• Ben and Director of Outreach Bruce Klein are co-organizing the Journal of Artificial General Intelligence (a new research journal), and AGI Network, an online social network for AI researchers.

Research Fellow Eliezer Yudkowsky:

• Eliezer has written 300,000 words as of March on the Overcoming Bias blog. Select material is intended for a popular book; the rest can be used by SIAI for years to come.
• Eliezer attended the AGI 08 Conference, AAAI Spring Symposium at Stanford, and will speak at the Oxford Future of Humanity Institute’s Global Catastrophic Risks Conference in July.

Director of Partnerships Jonas Lamis:

• In April, Jonas spoke at RoboBusiness 2008 on the future of autonomous vehicles, and at Envision on the coming waves of society-changing technologies.
• Jonas’s company SciVestor launched in January. SciVestor is focused on becoming a leading industry research firm for the business of breakthrough technologies.
• Jonas is working on a partner program for Singularity Summit 2008. He is also planning a SciVestor workshop to be held prior to the summit reception on the 17th.

Director of Strategy Colby Thomson:

• In February, Colby attended TED. He has been working with Tyler on naming/branding, PR, donor prospects, TV series and viral video discussion, and how to explain our mission concisely online.

Director of Outreach Bruce Klein:

• Bruce and Tyler are working with others on Convergence, an Unconference on November 15th-16th at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley.
• In collaboration with Dr. Pete Estep, James Clement, and Dr. Derya Unutmaz, Bruce and Tyler are helping start the Innerspace Foundation. IF will support neuroengineering approaches for the enhancement of memory and learning. On April 30th, Estep spoke about the foundation at the Bay Area Future Salon.

Other News

1. Director Ray Kurzweil collaborated on the National Academies’ Grand Challenges for Engineering in the 21st Century, announced in February. Other committee members included Segway creator Dean Kamen, Google Cofounder Larry Page, and genomics pioneer Craig Venter.
2. Ray was featured in Wired Magazine’s April issue.
3. Peter Thiel discussed the Singularity and SIAI in Reason Magazine’s May issue. Excerpt:

   Reason: Why do you support the Singularity Institute?

   Thiel: I think it’s a group of really smart people working on an important problem. I think that the basic rule of philanthropy I have is that I want to donate money to causes that are worthwhile but where there are no market-based mechanisms for them. There is a category of things that would benefit all of humanity but where the benefits are very diffuse and the costs are concentrated. Maybe it’s very long term. So I focus my philanthropy on things with a 20-, 30-, or 40-year horizon. The horizons are too long for a for-profit company to take advantage of, and the government and universities are not pushing things because maybe it’s too unconventional or it doesn’t easily fit into a particular political agenda or vision of the future. Those areas are probably systematically underfunded. It may be the only area of philanthropy that’s underfunded.

4. Steve Omohundro’s paper on “The Basic AI Drives,” and the following interviews on the challenges of artificial intelligence: SIAI Interview Series, Accelerating Future, and Future Blogger.

Events

1. Future Trends – The Singularity Hypothesis @ Santa Clara University: Organized by SIAI volunteers’ Victor Quintanar-Zilinskas and Yonah Berwaldt. Ben and Eliezer were speakers.
2. Artificial General Intelligence 2008 @ University of Memphis: Co-organized by Ben and Bruce.
3. BIL 2008 @ Monterey: Co-organized by Tyler. Sponsored by SIAI ($2,000).
4. Methuselah Foundation Conferences @ UCLA: June 27th-29th.
5. Singularity Summit 2008 @ San Jose Montgomery Theater: October 17th-18th. Details forthcoming.
6. BIL 2009 @ CalState Long Beach.

I had hoped to write up a real scientific summary of AGI-08, but at the moment it doesn’t look like I’ll find the time, so instead I’ll send out this briefer and more surface-level summary…

Firstly, the conference went very well. The tone was upbeat, the discussions were animated and intelligent, and all in all there was a feel of real excitement about having so many AGI people in one place at one time.

Attendance was good: We originally anticipated 80 registrants but had 120+.

The conference room was a futuristic setting called “The Zone” that looked sorta like the Star Trek bridge – with an excellent if mildly glitchy video system that, during Q&A sessions, showed the questioner on a big screen in front of the room.

The unconventional format (brief talks followed by long discussion/Q&A) sessions was both productive and popular. The whole thing was filmed and at some point will be available online (I don’t know the intended timing of this yet).

The proceedings volume was released by IOS Press a few weeks before the conference and is a thick impressive-looking tome.

The interdisciplinary aspect of the conference seemed to work well – e.g. the session on virtual-worlds AI was chaired by Sibley Verbeck (CEO of Electric Sheep Company), and the session on neural nets was chaired by Randal Koene (a neuroscientist from Boston University). This definitely made the discussions deeper than if it had been an AI-researchers-only crowd.

Plenty of folks from government agencies and large and small corporations were in attendance, as well as of course many AI academics and non-affiliated AGI enthusiasts. Among the AI academics were some highly-respected stalwarts of the AI community, alongside the new generation.

There seemed to be nearly as many Europeans as Americans there, which was a pleasant surprise, and some Asians as well.

The post-conference workshop on ethical, sociocultural and futurological issues drew about 60 people and was a bit of a free-for-all, with many conflicting perspectives presented quite emphatically and vociferously. I think most of that discussion was not captured on video (it took place in a different room where filming was less convenient), though the workshop talks themselves were.

The media folks in attendance seemed most energized by the section on AI in virtual worlds, which is because in this section the presenters (Andrew Shilliday, Martin Magnusson, and me) showed movies of cute animated characters doing stuff. This gave the nontechnical observers something to grab onto, which most of the other talks didn’t.

As at the earlier AGI-06 Workshop, one of the most obvious observations after listening to the talks was that a lot of AGI research programs are pursuing fairly similar architectures and ideas but using different languages to describe what they’re doing. This suggests that making a systematic effort at finding a common language and really understanding the true overlaps and differences of the various approaches, would be very beneficial. There was some talk of organizing a small, invitation-only workshop among practicing AGI system architects, perhaps in Fall 2008, with a view toward making progress in this direction.

Much enthusiasm was expressed for an AGI-09, and it was decided that this will likely be located in Washington DC, a location that will give us the opportunity to use the conference to help energize various government agencies about AGI.

There was also talk about the possibility of an AGI online technical journal, and a group of folks will be following that up, led by Pei Wang.

An “AGI Roadmap” project was also discussed, which would involve aligning different cognitive architectures currently proposed insofar as possible, but also go beyond that. Another key aspect of the roadmap might be an agreement on certain test environments or tasks that could be used to compare and explore various AGI architectures in more of a common way than is now possible.

Lots of ideas … lots of enthusiasm … a strong feeling of community-building. I’m really grateful to Stan Franklin, Pei Wang, Sidney DeMello, and Bruce Klein and everyone else who helped to organize the conference.

Finally, an interesting piece of feedback was given by my mother, who knows nothing about AGI research (she runs a social service agency) and who did not attend the conference but read the media coverage afterwards. What she said is that the media seems to be taking a far less skeptical and mocking tone toward AGI these days, as opposed to 7-10 years ago when I first started appearing in the media now and then. I think this is true, and it signifies a real shift in cultural attitude. This shift is what allowed The Singularity Is Near to sell as many copies as it did; and what encouraged so many AI academics to come to a mildly out-of-the-mainstream conference on AGI. Society, including the society of scientists, is starting to wake up to the notion that, given modern technology and science, human-level AGI is no longer a pipe dream but a potential near-term reality. Of course, there is a long way to go in terms of getting this kind of work taken as seriously as it should be, but at least things seem to be going in the right direction.

Audio of the news conference here

We have the thumbs up from TED Curator Chris Anderson, who has been very supportive.

Check out the BIL website and add your name if you can attend.

I hope to see many of you in Monterey, California in a few weeks.

If you can, please spread the word.

See also this BIL & TED post from Ethan Zuckerman, one of the main TED bloggers.

I’m happy to say that SIAI is the founding sponsor of BIL.

OnSingularity.com is a community driven project that aims to make it easier to find news, blogs, and events that are of interest to the futurist community, and also to provide an outlet for writers and bloggers in the field to reach an audience quickly, and by doing so, encourage more contributions, discussions, and collaboration in the field. As users browse the Web and come across interesting articles, they can easily share them with the community by clicking a button on their browser toolbar (a bookmarklet) or by using the Google Reader plugin without leaving the page they’re on. The articles are listed on the site for other readers to read and vote on. The more votes an article gets, the longer it stays on the home page and the higher it moves up in the list. OnSingularity also facilitates questions and discussions where users can post a question to the community rather than an article, and have other users vote the question up and discuss it if it’s interesting to them.

OnSingularity limits its scope to subjects that interest the futurist community. For example, Artificial Intelligence, nanotechnology, biotechnology, transhumanism, accelerating change, and similar subjects. The narrow focus keeps the news interesting, and the discussions intelligent and informative. This model uses the news as a conversation starter to keep the community engaged, and it rewards those who participate intelligently by pushing their contributions to the top and giving them more visibility. It also encourages more bloggers to write because it provides an easy way for them to reach an audience.

How you can participate and help make this project more useful:

• Vote on the articles you like to see more of on the Web site. Your votes are critical to maintain a high standard of quality.
• Submit relevant articles and share with the community. Add the bookmarklet (or the Google Reader plugin) so you can submit quickly as you browse the Web.

For the recent week, I have together with Tom McCabe been collecting all sorts of objections that have been raised against the concepts of AGI, the Singularity, Friendliness, and anything else relating to SIAI’s work. We’ve managed to get a bunch of them together, so it seemed like the next stage would be to publicly ask people for any objections we may have missed.

The objections we’ve gathered so far are listed below. If you know of any objection related to these topics that you’ve seriously considered, or have heard people bring up, please mention it if it’s not in this list, no matter how silly it might seem to you now. (If you’re not sure of whether the objection falls under the ones already covered, send it anyway, just to be sure.) You can send your objections to the list or to me directly. Thank you in advance for everybody who replies.
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According to steering committee member Eric Drexler, “It centers on today’s capabilities, exploring the rewards we can expect from incremental advances, and links these advances to longer term objectives for atomically precise manufacturing.”

The report is the culmination of two years of effort, underwritten by The Waitt Family Foundation and Sun Microsystems, and led by Battelle Memorial Institute. The road-map and associated working group findings are available from e-drexler.com.

If you enjoy this story, please use NPR’s “Email this page” to share it. This will signal interest in the subject, and may increase the chance of more stories about the Singularity Institute.