The Singularity Institute Blog

The first batch of Singularity Summit 2008 videos is now available online, with more to come.

Michael Vassar and perhaps others will be visiting the Bay Area on a regular basis on SIAI business.  If you have a car that you’d like to donate for SIAI official use, you should be able to deduct the Kelly Blue Book private party sale value of that car as a tax deduction, since we’ll actually be using the car rather than reselling it at auction.  (Most car donations will only get you the much lower auction value of that car, not its private-party sale value.)  Conversely we can only accept a safe car in good operating condition, not a junker.

Posting this now because the end of 2008 is fast approaching.   (As soon as you tell us that you want to donate the car, then, after we accept, the time you first committed to donating if we accepted, should count as the time of the gift for tax purposes.)

The Artificial Brain Laboratory at Xiamen University has announced a three-week summer school in Artificial General Intelligence, June 22 to July 10, 2009.

The course is aimed at graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, although it may also be appropriate for some advanced undergraduates and independent or industry researchers.

Instructors are international researchers experienced in various areas of Artificial General Intelligence and related fields, among them Dr. Ben Goertzel, SIAI Director of Research; and Dr. Joel Pitt, whom SIAI has engaged to work on the OpenCog project.

More information and registration details here.

SIAI Research Fellow Eliezer Yudkowsky interviewed Dr Aubrey de Grey, SIAI Advisor and chairman and chief science officer of the Methuselah Foundation, about the effort to end aging.

Video and audio at Bloggingheads.tv

A Call of Papers has been issued for a track on “Technological Singularity and Acceleration Studies,” at the 7th European conference on Computing And Philosophy—ECAP 2009, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2-4 July 2009.

Historical analysis of a broad range of paradigm shifts in science, biology, history, and technology–in particular in computing technology–suggests an accelerating rate of progress. This observation has led the attempted unification of the predictive power of biological evolution, cultural evolution, and technological evolution under a “Law of Accelerating Returns.” As a consequence, John von Neumann forecasted the arrival of an “essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs as we know them could not continue.” This notion of Singularity coincides in time and nature with Alan Turing (1950) and Stephen Hawking’s (1998) expectation of machines that exhibit intelligence on par with an average human by 2050. John Irving Good (1965) and Vernor Vinge (1993) expect it to take the form of an ‘intelligence explosion’: the process by which ultraintelligent machines design ever more intelligent machines. Transhumanists suggest a parallel process of explosive progress in human intelligence. Unfortunately, the very term ‘Singularity’ also suggests the presence of an ‘event horizon,’ an epistemological barrier on our ability to understand the events that may follow it.

We invite abstracts examining the following issues from a philosophical, computational, mathematical, and scientific points of view:

1. Empirical assessments of the Law of Accelerating Returns
2. Estimating the reliability of a technological forecasts
3. Historical analysis of the Law of Accelerating Returns
4. The impact of acceleration on science and society by 2050
5. Hazards of technological acceleration and preventative measures
6. The nature of the Technological Singularity
7. The nature of an intelligence explosion
8. Beyond the ‘event horizon’ of the Technological Singularity

Papers submitted to the Technological Singularity and Acceleration Studies track in ECAP 2009 will also be considered for publication in a special issue of Technological Forecasting and Social Change (Elsevier).

Received from the track chair, Amnon H. Eden, School of Computer Science & Electronic Engineering, University of Essex, UK and Center For Inquiry, Amherst NY.

SIAI Executive Director Tyler Emerson was interviewed by Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon of The Speculist on FastForward Radio.

Topics included the definition of the Singularity; and how the Singularity impacts what we can and should expect of the future.

SIAI Research Fellow Eliezer Yudkowsky has redesigned his personal website: Visit it at http://yudkowsky.net.

The Convergence08 Unconference will be happening this weekend.

If you can’t attend, follow the details live this Saturday and Sunday at FastForward Radio, presented by The Speculist.

Thomas B. Edsall at the Huffington Post writes about the role of (narrow) AI in the recent financial crisis. He interviews Dr. Ben Goertzel, SIAI Director of Research; as well as Ray Kurzweil, member of the SIAI Board of Directors; with a mention of SIAI Research Fellow Eliezer Yudkowsky, in “Man Versus Machine.”

SIAI Research Fellow Eliezer Yudkowsky spoke with Jaron Lanier, virtual reality pioneer and Interdisciplinary Scholar-in-Residence at the University of California Berkeley, in “Science Saturday: Dreaming of an Artificial Intelligence”, at Bloggingheads.tv.