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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]