Kent Bye

Photo by David Orban

The Singularity Institute held a Singularity Summit in San Francisco on September 8th & 9th that brought together some of the leading thinkers in the field of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

The basic premise is that technology is already accelerating at an exponential rate and drastically changing our lives and culture. Technology is already augmenting our lives in many different ways -- from Google search, social networks, recommendation systems, cell phones and beyond. The vision is that at some point these technologies will start to have an even more generalizable intelligence that will help us in even more ways than they are now.

And when these AGI's are able to iteratively improve themselves and evolve and improve over time, then at some point they may become as smart as -- or smarter than humans. This is the point that is commonly referred to as "The Singularity," because our models of the world start to break down when we have entities that are smarter than humans.

Photo by gi

This immediately brings up all sorts of dystopian visions that Hollywood and science fiction writers have been fleshing out for many years. There are indeed a lot of risks and power that will come from these technologies, but there are also a lot of benefit that can come from them as well.

So this weekend explored a range of the possible empowering breakthroughs of human potential as well as doomsday perils of a highly evolved artificial general intelligence. There was a wide variety of different perspectives over the weekend, and the discussion resolved much of my initial, gut-level Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt about this issue -- yet I still have a number of concerns for how some of the many open questions will play out.

Below are my notes from the weekend's event in a pretty raw form:
[NOTE: I'll be adding in some more of these slides from Flickr as time permits]

DAY ONE

* Rodney Brooks: Singularity is a period not an event
* Eliezer Yudkowsky: Introducing the "Singularity": Three Major Schools of Thought
* Barney Pell: Pathways to Advanced General Intelligence; Architecture, Development, and Funding
* Sam Adams: Superstition and Forgetfulness are Critical Components of AGI
* Wendell Wallach: The Road to Singularity: Comedic Complexity, Technological Thresholds, and Bioethical Broad Jumps
* Marcos Guillen: Visualizing the Neurological Correlates with CCortex
* Jamais Cascio: Metaverse Singularity
* Stephen Omohundro: The Nature of Self-Improving Artificial Intelligence
* Peter Voss: Increased Intelligence, Improved Life
* Neil Jacobstein: Innovative Applications of Early Stage AI
* Ben Goertzel: Nine Years To a Positive Singularity -- If We Really, Really Try
* Paul Saffo: Machines of Loving Grace: Envisioning Advanced AI

DAY TWO

* Peter Norvig: The History and Future of Technological Change
* J. Storrs Hall: Asimov's Laws of Robotics -- Revised
* Peter Thiel: Financial Markets and the Singularity
* Charles L. Harper, Jr.: Superintelligence, the Dilemma of Power, and the Transformation of Desire
* Special XPrize Presentation
* Steve Jurvetson: Dichotomy of Designed and Evolutionary Paths to AI Futures
* Christine Peterson: Preparing for Bizarreness: Open Source Physical Security
* James Hughes: Waiting for the Great Leap...Forward?
* Eliezer Yudkowsky: The Challenge of Friendly AI
* Ray Kurzweil: Accelerating Change Q & A