The Singularity Institute Blog

It’s that time of the year again — the Singularity Summit 2010 is scheduled for August 14-15 at the Hyatt Regency in San Francisco. See you there! Here is our press release:

Singularity Summit 2010 returns to San Francisco, explores intelligence augmentation
Speakers include Futurist Ray Kurzweil, Magician-Skeptic James Randi

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 August 14-15, hundreds of AI researchers, robotics experts, philosophers, entrepreneurs, scientists, and interested laypeople will converge in San Francisco to address the Singularity and related issues at the only conference on the topic, the Singularity Summit. Experts in fields including animal intelligence, artificial intelligence, brain-computer interfacing, tissue regeneration, medical ethics, computational neurobiology, augmented reality, and more will share their latest research and explore its implications for the future of humanity.

“This year, the conference shifts to a focus on neuroscience, bioscience, cognitive enhancement, and other explorations of what Vernor Vinge called ‘intelligence amplification’ — the other route to the Singularity,” said Michael Vassar, president of the Singularity Institute, which is hosting the event.

Irene Pepperberg, author of “Alex & Me,” who has pushed the frontier of animal intelligence with her research on African Gray Parrots, will explore the ethical and practical implications of non-human intelligence enhancement and of the creation of new intelligent life less powerful than ourselves. Futurist-inventor Ray Kurzweil will discuss reverse-engineering the brain and his forthcoming book, How the Mind Works and How to Build One. Allan Synder, Director, Centre for the Mind at the University of Sydney, will explore the use of transcranial magnetic stimulation for the enhancement of narrow cognitive abilities. Joe Tsien will talk about the smarter rats and mice that he created by tuning the molecular substrate of the brain’s learning mechanism. Steve Mann, “the world’s first cyborg,” will demonstrate his latest geek-chic inventions: wearable computers now used by almost 100,000 people.

Other speakers will include magician-skeptic and MacArthur Genius Award winner James Randi; Gregory Stock (Redesigning Humans), former Director of the Program on Medicine, Technology, and Society at UCLA’s School of Public Health; Terry Sejnowski, Professor and Laboratory Head, Salk Institute Computational Neurobiology Laboratory, who believes we are just ten years away from being able to upload ourselves; Ellen Heber-Katz, Professor, Molecular and Cellular Oncogenesis Program at The Wistar Institute, who is investigating the molecular basis of wound regeneration in mutant mice, which can regenerate limbs, hearts, and spinal cords; Anita Goel, MD, physicist, and CEO of nanotechnology company Nanobiosym; and David Hanson, Founder & CEO, Hanson Robotics, who is creating the world’s most realistic humanoid robots.

Interested readers can watch videos from past summits and register at www.singularitysummit.com.

Humanity+, the worldwide association of transhumanists, is putting on a conference at Harvard on June 12-13. Tickets are available here (be sure to use that specific URL to register so SIAI can earn 20% of ticket cost as a referral bonus). The theme is “rise of the citizen scientist”. Here is all the blurb:

The summer 2010 “Humanity+ @ Harvard – The Rise Of The Citizen Scientist” conference is being held, after the inaugural conference in Los Angeles in December 2009, on the East Coast, at Harvard University’s prestigious Science Hall on June 12-13. Futurist, inventor, and author of the NYT bestselling book “The Singularity Is Near”, Ray Kurzweil is going to be keynote speaker of the conference. Full information is at http://hplussummit.com

Also speaking at the H+ Summit @ Harvard is Aubrey de Grey, a biomedical gerontologist based in Cambridge, UK, and is the Chief Science Officer of SENS Foundation, a California-based charity dedicated to combating the aging process. His talk, “Hype and anti-hype in academic biogerontology research: a call to action”, will analyze the interplay of over-pessimistic and over-optimistic positions with regards of research and development of cures, and propose solutions to alleviate the negative effects of both.

The theme is “The Rise Of The Citizen Scientist”, as illustrated in his talk by Alex Lightman, Executive Director of Humanity+:

“Knowledge may be expanding exponentially, but the current rate of civilizational learning and institutional upgrading is still far too slow in the century of peak oil, peak uranium, and “peak everything”. Humanity needs to gather vastly more data as part of ever larger and more widespread scientific experiments, and make science and technology flourish in streets, fields, and homes as well as in university and corporate laboratories.”

Humanity+ Summit @ Harvard is an unmissable event for everyone who is interested in the evolution of the rapidly changing human condition, and the impact of accelerating technological change on the daily lives of individuals, and on our society as a whole. Tickets start at only $150, with an additional 50% discount for students registering with the coupon STUDENTDISCOUNT (valid student ID required at the time of admission).

With over 40 speakers, and 50 sessions in two jam packed days, the attendees, and the speakers will have many opportunities to interact, and discuss, complementing the conference with the necessary networking component.

Other speakers already listed on the H+ Summit program page include:

* David Orban, Chairman of Humanity+: “Intelligence Augmentation,
Decision Power, And The Emerging Data Sphere”
* Heather Knight, CTO of Humanity+: “Why Robots Need to Spend More
Time in the Limelight”
* Andrew Hessel, Co-Chair at Singularity University: “Altered
Carbon: The Emerging Biological Diamond Age”
* M. A. Greenstein, Art Center College of Design: “Sparking our
Neural Humanity with Neurotech!”
* Michael Smolens, CEO of dotSUB: “Removing language as a barrier to
cross cultural communication”

New speakers will be announced in rapid succession, rounding out a schedule that is guaranteed to inform, intrigue, stimulate and provoke, in moving ahead our planetary understanding of the evolution of the human condition!

H+ Summit @ Harvard – The Rise Of The Citizen Scientist
June 12-13, Harvard University
Cambridge, MA

When you register, please use the URL
http://www.eventbrite.com/event/648806598/friendsofhplus/4283047925 for
tracking purposes.

I’ve created a group for the Singularity Institute on LinkedIn, to encourage professional networking among SIAI supporters and staff. Consider joining if you are an SIAI supporter and use LinkedIn.

Here is a quote from the Chalmers paper that I linked yesterday:

One might think that the singularity would be of great interest to academic philosophers, cognitive scientists, and artificial intelligence researchers. In practice, this has not been the case. Good was an eminent academic, but his article was largely unappreciated at the time. The subsequent discussion of the singularity has largely taken place in nonacademic circles, including Internet forums, popular media and books, and workshops organized by the independent Singularity Institute. Perhaps the highly speculative flavor of the singularity idea has been responsible for academic resistance to the idea.

I think this resistance is a shame, as the singularity idea is clearly an important one. The argument for a singularity is one that we should take seriously. And the questions surrounding the singularity are of enormous practical and philosophical concern.

Practically: If there is a singularity, it will be one of the most important events in the history of the planet. An intelligence explosion has enormous potential benefits: a cure for all known diseases, an end to poverty, extraordinary scientific advances, and much more. It also has enormous potential dangers: an end to the human race, an arms race of warring machines, the power to destroy the planet. So if there is even a small chance that there will be a singularity, we would do well to think about what forms it might take and whether there is anything we can do to influence the outcomes in a positive direction.

Great advice for everyone living in the 21st century!

Amnon Eden, an organizer of the European conference on Computing And Philosophy, recently sent us this call for papers.

Track in:

8th European conference on Computing And Philosophy — ECAP 2010
Technische Universität München
4–6 October 2010

Important dates:

* Submission (extended abstracts): 7 May 2010
* Notification: 9 May 2010
* ECAP Conference: 4–6 October 2010

Submission form

Theme

Historical analysis of a broad range of paradigm shifts in science, biology, history, technology, and in particular in computing technology, suggests an accelerating rate of evolution, however measured. John von Neumann projected that the consequence of this trend may be 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 to exhibit intelligence on a par with to the average human no later than 2050. Irving John Good (1965) and Vernor Vinge (1993) expect the singularity to take the form of an ‘intelligence explosion’, a process in which intelligent machines design ever more intelligent machines. Transhumanists suggest a parallel or alternative, explosive process of improvements in human intelligence. And Alvin Toffler’s Third Wave (1980) forecasts “a collision point in human destiny” the scale of which, in the course of history, is on the par only with the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution.

We invite submissions describing systematic attempts at understanding the likelihood and nature of these projections. In particular, we welcome papers critically analyzing the following issues from a philosophical, computational, mathematical, scientific and ethical standpoints:

* Claims and evidence to acceleration
* Technological predictions (critical analysis of past and future)
* The nature of an intelligence explosion and its possible outcomes
* The nature of the Technological Singularity and its outcome
* Safe and unsafe artificial general intelligence and preventative measures
* Technological forecasts of computing phenomena and their projected impact
* Beyond the ‘event horizon’ of the Technological Singularity
* The prospects of transhuman breakthroughs and likely timeframes

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

Recently, David Chalmers announced that he was posting a new paper based on his Singularity Summit 2010 talk: “The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis”. In his announcement, Chalmers notes, “I’m still an amateur on these topics and any feedback would be appreciated.” You can also watch a video of Chalmers’ Summit talk.

The Singularity Institute is pleased to welcome Max Tegmark, professor at MIT and a cosmologist as the newest member of our greatly valued advisory board. Prof. Tegmark has done pioneering research in precision cosmology, “combining theoretical work with new measurements to place sharp constraints on cosmological models and their free parameters”. A couple of his widely-discussed papers with more of a philosophical bent include “Is “the theory of everything” merely the ultimate ensemble theory?” and “The Mathematical Universe”.

Tegmark has also contributed to popular understanding of esoteric physics concepts with front-page articles in Scientific American and New Scientist. Scans of these stories are available at his website. Prof. Tegmark will help the Singularity Institute by expanding our network at MIT and within academia in general. Thank you for joining us, Professor Tegmark!

Thanks to our donors, yesterday we met our fundraising goal of $100,000 for the 2010 Singularity Research Challenge. SIAI would like to thank the grant’s matching donors and everyone who contributed. Every donation, however small, funds research and advocacy targeted towards maximizing the probability of a positive Singularity.

If you have any questions or comments about SIAI’s activity or would like to discuss targeted donations for future projects, please feel free to contact us anytime at institute at singinst dot org. We also encourage you to subscribe to this blog, if you haven’t already, to stay up-to-date on SIAI’s activity.

Again, thank you, and here’s to a productive and successful 2010!

Thanks to generous contributions by our donors, we are only $11,840 away from fulfilling our $100,000 goal for the 2010 Singularity Research Challenge. For every dollar you contribute to SIAI, another dollar is contributed by our matching donors, who have pledged to match all contributions made before February 28th up to $100,000. That means that this Sunday is your final chance to donate for maximum impact.

Funds from the challenge campaign will be used to support all SIAI activities: our core staff, the Singularity Summit, the Visiting Fellows program, and more. Donors can earmark their funds for specific grant proposals, many of which are targeted towards academic paper-writing, or just contribute to our general fund. The grants system makes it easier to bring new researchers into the fold on a part-time basis, widening the pool of thinkers producing quality work on Artificial Intelligence risks and other topics relevant to SIAI’s interests. It also provides transparency so our donor community can directly evaluate the impact of their contributions.

Human-level and smarter Artificial Intelligence will likely have huge impacts on humanity, but only a tiny number of researchers are working to understand how to ensure those impacts are good ones. The role of the Singularity Institute is to fill that void, bringing scholarship and science to bear on challenging questions. Instead of just letting the chips fall where they may, help the Singularity Institute increase the probability of a positive Singularity by contributing financially to our research effort. We depend completely on donors like you for all funding.

2010 marks the 10th year since SIAI’s founding. With your help, SIAI will still exist in 2015, 2020, 2025… however long it takes to get to a positive Singularity. Thank you for your support!

The 2010 Singularity Research Challenge campaign has been going well, with $77,080 raised so far. Including matching funds, that comes to $154,160 raised for SIAI since we began the Challenge! Thanks to these contributions, SIAI’s continued operations and growth will be ensured for the immediate future. This money will support our staff, the Singularity Summit 2010, our highly successful Visiting Fellows program, all funded grant proposals, and other existential risk-reducing SIAI activity.

Even though we’ve raised a lot so far, we aren’t done yet! Please contribute to help us achieve our goal, and please feel free to get in contact with Anna Salamon at annasalamon at singinst dot org if you are making a large donation to fund a new project. Even if you wish to make a small donation, understand that small donations matter. We appreciate contributions of any size because they show us that you care about the Singularity.

Whether you donate or not, we recommend browsing SIAI’s grant proposals to get a better idea of some of the work we’re doing. You can also review our 2009 accomplishments to see our past record. Half of the funds from this challenge will go to grants, while the other half goes to our general fund, which supports our core staff, including Eliezer Yudkowsky and the organizers of the Singularity Summit 2010. All donations are securely processed through Paypal. You can pay through Paypal using your credit card even if you don’t have a Paypal account. You can also send checks to our P.O. Box, listed here. You can also read an endorsement of SIAI by a prominent utilitarian, or read quotes by our donors in the quotes section.

Donate now, and help bring mankind closer to a positive Singularity.