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. The system is antiquated and tailored toward groups of children rather than an individual student.

X Prize will focus on educational software improvements in upcoming education prizes. Competitors will creates adaptive educational software with near real-time student assessment and diagnostic capabilities with interactive game-like interfaces. The subjects to be covered first are Algebra 1, Basic Literacy, and Second Language Acquisition.

A learning achievement goals of two sigma (average student achievement greater than 98% of classroom students) was suggested.

Can software improve learning? A recent study suggests current software solutions do not, but the X Prize Foundation would like to show that breakthrough software could do so in the near future. Some possibilities include networked gaming settings, intelligent software, peer-to-peer, and teacher-assisted.

While no specific prizes and amounts were announced, Lindsay asked for audience comments regarding development of future prizes. The responses were, perhaps expectedly, opinionated and passionate. When asked by Lindsay if the problem of education might be solved within ten years, a minority of audience members raised their hands.

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 the”transformation of desire”?

Peter Thiel is an investor, co-founder of PayPal before it sold to eBay, and supporter of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. He offered advice regarding investing in a world where the possibility of a Technological Singularity exists.

The Singularity suggests to Thiel either profoundly positive or negative outcomes. Since it makes little sense to invest in a negative outcome (one in which the world is ended) and because we cannot currently determine the probability of outcomes, it does make sense to take risks and to invest in positive outcomes. Thiel believes that the technologies and trends that will lead to the Singularity might not be known at this time.

Thiel briefly listed busts and booms of the past couple decades and suggested that rather than becoming less volatile over time, these have actually become more so, with amplitudes between them having become greater. All of these busts and booms suggest to Thiel bets on the Singularity, or proxies likes globalization. As we near the Singularity, these busts and booms will continue and increase.

What then should investors invest in? Thiel suggested investors focus on incipient booms that most people have not yet recognized.

Dr. J. Storrs Hall, an independent AI researcher, inventor, and author, presented a revised version of Isaac Asimov’s Laws of Robotics.

Unlike Asimov’s robots, we want our AI to be self-improving. If there are to be laws, they will need to be flexible and abstract, like a conscience. Just like technology, morality can be improved, and we should create an environment within AI for this to occur.

Hall’s proposed new laws are:

• Law #1: A robot shall understand as much as possible.
  • Law #1a: In particular, a robot shall understand memetic evolution.
• Law #2: A robot shall be open source.
• Law #3: A robot shall be economically sentient.
• Law #4: A robot shall be trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly,
  courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrify, brave, clean, reverent, and
  shall do a good turn daily.

Dr. Peter Norvig is Director of Research at Google. He spoke about the difficulty and inaccuracy of prediction, as well as his thoughts on how AGI will be developed.

Prediction by experts has been found by some researchers to be less effective if the expert knew a lot about particular subjects or were driven by underlying grand-unifying ideas. In effect, they become overconfident, thus clouding their ability to make predictions. The lesson learned from these observations is that any individual can have an opinion as good as an expert. Regarding the Technological Singularity and AGI, Norvig advised audience members to read, compare alternative views, keep up with the topics, and come to their own conclusions.

Norvig provided a list of AGI prequisites:

• Probabilistic First-Order Logic - deal with uncertainties
• Hierarchical representation and problem solving
• Learning over the above
• With lots of data
• Online
• Efficiently

Rodney Brooks asked Norvig if Google had observed any unexpected emergent behaviors that might suggest an emerging intelligence as sometimes depicted in science fiction movies. While there were unexpected problems and lessons learned, no unexpected emergent behaviors have been observed to date.

Peter Voss, founder and CEO of Adaptive AI, a stealth AGI company, focused on the benefits that might result from the advent of AGI. Voss is optimistic that AGI will be developed in less than 10 years, and potentially in less than 5 years. For Voss, hardware is not a problem. The pieces of the AGI puzzle are in place and simply need to be put together correctly. A renewed interest in AGI indicates that there is currently an AI revival going on.

AGI can results in lower costs, better and safer products and services, and reduced work risks. These benefits will then lead to an improved standard of living for all humans, the fast tracking of developing nations, and accelerating improvements to technology. Other technologies will benefit, including nanotechnology, medical science, environmental technology, and computer science. Health and longevity research will benefit because AGI can conceivably act as focused researchers 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This same capability means AGI can act as teachers, scientists, news reporters, and advisers. With their expected development using logic, reason, and science, AGI could benefit ethics and morality by removing irrational behavior and helping society move toward more rational politics and government.

A few challenges remain. The company that successfully develops AGI will need a viable design, fitting together all the pieces of the AGI puzzle in the appropriate way. The company will also need vision that spans the gap between an early design and actually having a working AGI. In addition, focus, leadership and funding are all important.

Dr. Stephen Omohundro, founder and president of Self-Aware Systems, spoke about self-improving systems using the science of microeconomic theory. Using space, time, matter, and free energy resources, AI, like humans, will seek self-improvement and converge on rational agents, a small area of mind space.

While evolution lead to rational agents, it could only act through many generations and existing situations. A self-improving agent can not only adapt to existing situations but also think about situations it has not yet faced. Omohundro provided one possible definition of self-improving systems: devices for converting resources into expected utility.

How can these self-improving agents continue improving? Through efficiency gains, self-preservation, acquisition of resources, and creativity, any one of these can be considered the drive of self-improving agents.

Jamais Cascio is a writer and speaker, cofounded WorldChanging.com, and has served as a futurist for several organizations. He introduced the concept of the Metaverse, as it might relate to the Technological Singularity. The Metaverse includes ideas like virtual worlds, mirror worlds, augmented reality, and lifelogging. Each one offers glimpes of how the Singularity might emerge, as well as a testing ground for technologies that may lead to the Singularity.

Cascio also explored the dangers of intelligent agents in the Metaverse. Because software is a human creation, it will no doubt be buggy and coded depending on the choices, biases, and desires of human programmers. Cascio suggested a possible solution: an open access Singularity, one where openness, transparency, and democracy ensure the global inclusion of interests.

Here are two other livebloggers from the Singularity Summit 2007:

• Michael Anissimov at Accelerating Future
• David Orban

Marcus Guillen of Artificial Development (AD) announced today at the Singularity Summit 2007 the company’s first commercial product: the CCortex Spiking Neural Network Engine. A mammalian brain simulator, the technology can simulate up to 100 billion individual neurons and up to 100,000 synapses per neuron.

A free version will be provided online, as well as Developer, Evolution, and Platform versions. Using an AJAX-based GUI, users can simulate brains from mice to humans, depending on the computing resources available for the effort. AD will provide computing utility services, and will also allow customers to use the software on the customer’s own systems. Environmental inputs to the simulated brain in the form of cameras, microphones and other sensors can be added to the platform.

While the current technology itself is not AGI, Guillen suggested that simulating brains will one day lead to successful AGI. The platform model will improve over time as AD includes more information from the cutting-edge of brain research and as other companies make use of this technology in their own product development and research.