The Singularity Institute Blog

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.

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.

From Waleed Abdulla:

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.