Summit Podcast with Steve Jurvetson
Managing Director, Draper Fisher Jurvetson
Podcast
Reprinted from ZDNET's Between the Lines; interview by ZDNET Editor in Chief Dan Farber
Steve Jurvetson is one of the featured speakers, among other luminaries, at the forthcoming Singularity Summit 2007 on advanced artificial intelligence (AI). As a managing director at the venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, he invested early in the first Web wave, with Hotmail, Interwoven and Kana, and has now turned his attention to the arcane world of nanotechnology, molecular electronics and quantum computing.
Jurvetson shares the view espoused by Ray Kurzweil that the next 20 years of technological progress will be equivalent to the entire 20th century, and will help fuel great progress in advanced AI. In our podcast conversation, we discuss designed and evolutionary approaches to developing smart AI as well as the possible cultural impact of machine intelligences and genetic enhancements the surpass human capabilities. In addition, Jurvetson offers his views on how nanotechnology, molecular electronics and quantum computing carry on Moore’s Law and could bring about profound, life-altering changes in the next few decades.
The Singularity Summit 2007 takes place September 8-9 at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, and will discuss the fate of the human species in a future where AI entities far smarter than us and how we might shape AIs to be more benevolent than malevolent.
See also my podcast interview with Eliezer Yudkowsky, a research fellow with the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. He discusses his idea of “Friendly AI” and the challenges to achieving self-reflective AI systems far beyond the capacity of human intelligence.