Paul Saffo from Stanford University is a forecaster and essayist. He explored AGI at the Singularity Summit 2007 in the context of popularization. Even as the public begins to join the AGI discussion, pessimism is popular right now. News reporting and commentary are lurid and pessimistic. Saffo suggested that what we [...]

Dr. Ben Goertzel is SIAI Director of Research and chief science officer and acting CEO of Novamente. He believes that with the right funding and capital, AGI could be developed in nine years. Novamente is approaching AGI development by focusing on virtual agents in virtual worlds like Second Life.
Goertzel defined AGI as “the [...]

Neil Jacobstein, chairman and CEO of Teknowledge Corporation, spoke in the afternoon of day one of the Singularity Summit 2007. He presented information about where we stand today with AI and where we might be heading in the medium term. Specialized AI applications have existed for a number of years and [...]

Ray Kurzweil is an inventor and futurist, perhaps best known now for his books and lectures regarding accelerating change and the Technological Singularity. He joined the Singularity Summit 2007 via satellite. Because his work was referenced often in other speakers’ talks, he addressed some of their comments and conclusions, including a defense of [...]

Yudkowsky returned to the stage to discuss the challenge of Friendly AI. The problem, to Yudkowsky, is increasingly difficult because it is difficult to pick out, of all mind possibilities, the one that we would consider friendly. In some sense, we would like to develop AI that can create expert AI, and an [...]

James Hughes is the the executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and host of Changesurfer Radio. He discussed preparation for the future and how futurists can have an impact on public policy.
Hughes listed a series of assumptions he makes about AGI and the Technological Singularity, such as AGI [...]

Christine Peterson is Vice President of Foresight Nanotech Institute and she talked about how we can prepare for the advent of AGI (what she called “preparing for bizarreness”), with a focus on upcoming risks.
According to Peterson, risks, and their potential solutions, can be approached in a top-down monolithic way, or a bottom-up way, in which [...]

Steve Jurvetson is a Managing Director for the venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson. He explored two possible paths to AGI, while emphasizing an evolutionary, bottom-up approach versus designing AGI directly, based on the experience of DFJ investigating and investing in nanotechnology.
Evolved systems could result in robust, resilient, and adaptive technologies, such as [...]

Michael Lindsay from the X Prize Foundation announced the possible development of an upcoming series of education X Prizes. After a video about past and current X Prizes, Lindsay provided new details about their latest incentive competitions.
Education is a challenge, especially in the United States. The public perceives the school system as broken. [...]

Dr. Charles L. Harper, Jr. is Senior Vice President for the John Templeton Foundation. He provided three big questions people might want to think about regarding AGI and the Technological Singularity:

Big Question #1: What do slugs know of Mozart?
Big Question #2: How serious is the “dilemma of power”?
Big Question #3: How important is [...]