Singularity Summit 2012 - Create the Future

The Singularity Summit is the Singularity Institute’s annual conference on science, technology, and the future. Topics explored include artificial intelligence, brain-computer interfaces, the Singularity, robotics, regenerative medicine, and big picture issues on the trajectory of human civilization. Each year, about 25 eminent speakers share their latest views over the course of two days.

The conference was founded by the Singularity Institute, Ray Kurzweil, and Peter Thiel in 2006. The inaugural conference was held in 2006 at Stanford University. Until 2008 the conference was held in the San Francisco Bay Area, at which point it began alternating between New York (where the conference was held in 2009 and 2011) and the Bay Area. The event regularly attracts over 800 scientists, entrepreneurs, academics, and other thinkers. In 2010, it was covered in a front-page article in TIME magazine.

Nathan Labenz: "Opening Remarks"


Temple Grandin - How Different People Think Differently
Author, professor, and autism advocate Temple Grandin uses the example of the 2012 Fukushima nuclear disaster to illustrate how sometimes, the most obvious flaws in a system can be the least apparent to those working in it.

Dr. Grandin is a designer of livestock handling facilities and a Professor of Animal Science at Colorado State University.

Temple Grandin: "How Different People Think Differently"


Laura Deming - End Aging
Thiel Fellow Laura Deming makes a plea for health research to tackle an epidemic that affects everyone: the negative effects of aging.

Currently a partner at Floreat Capital and fellow with the Thiel Foundation 20under20 Fellowship, Laura has wanted to cure aging since the age of 8. After years working on nematode longevity at the UCSF graduate school, Laura matriculated to MIT at 14 to work on artificial organogenesis and bone aging, and is now based in SF, working to find and fund therapies to extend the human healthspan.

Laura Deming: "End Aging"


Julia Galef - Rationality and the Future
Julia Galef, president and co-founder of the Center for Applied Rationality, describes humanity as slave to its own genes: that is, people exist solely to perpetuate their DNA. Furthermore, she argues, we have to contend with the fact that "the genes don't care about us."

Julia Galef is the president and co-founder of the Center for Applied Rationality, an organization teaching math and cognitive science-based techniques for effective decisionmaking. She has a degree in statistics from Columbia University.

Julia Galef: "Rationality and the Future"


Luke Muehlhauser - The Singularity, Promise and Peril
Luke Muehlhauser, Executive Director of the Singularity Institute, takes on skeptics who argue that superhuman artificial intelligence will forever remain beyond the capabilities of technology. "If you make these kinds of predictions about what machines can't do, you're going to end up on the wrong side of history," he says.

Luke Muehlhauser has published dozens of articles on self-help, decision-making, and artificial intelligence, including peer-reviewed research on AI safety. He is currently the Executive Director of the Singularity Institute.

Luke Muehlhauser: "The Singularity, Promise and Peril"


Linda Avey - Personal Genomics
Linda Avey, co-founder of 23andMe and Curious, reassures those with concerns about abuse of genetic information that it is not possible to make designer babies like in Gattaca, but there are ways to avoid some genetic diseases.

Linda Avey is co-founder and CEO of Curious, Inc., a personal data discovery platform. Previously, she co-founded 23andMe, the leading personal genetics company.

Linda Avey: "Personal Genomics"


Steven Pinker - A History of Violence
Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker links the Humanitarian Revolution, an historical decline in violence, to widespread literacy. "It's plausible," he explains, "that as people consume fiction, drama, history, and journalism, they start to inhabit the minds of people unlike themselves, which conceivably could expand their empathy and decrease their taste for cruelty."

Steven Pinker is Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, and has also taught at Stanford and MIT.

Steven Pinker: "A History of Violence"


Ray Kurzweil - How to Create a Mind
Author and futurist Ray Kurzweil examines the rise in health and wealth levels throughout the world since 1800, speculating that combining human intelligence with artificial intelligence will continue to perpetuate this trend.

Ray Kurzweil is a famous entrepreneur and inventor, described as “the restless genius” by The Wall Street Journal, and Co-Founder of the Singularity Summit.

Ray Kurzweil: "How to Create a Mind"


Q&A: Economist Daniel Kahneman, the Pioneer of Heuristics
Noble Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman comments on the most important biases concerning the singularity. Kahneman sees the major bias as believing in seemingly inevitable scenarios.

Daniel Kahneman pioneered the field of heuristics and biases with Amos Tversky. He won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on human decision-making.

Daniel Kahneman: "Q&A"


Melanie Mitchell: - AI and the Barrier of Meaning
Melanie Mitchell, Professor of Computer Science at Portland State University, redefines "singularity" to mean "the appearance of a machine that crosses the barrier of meaning." Mitchell proposes to do this by teaching computers visual concepts that they can re-purpose as analogies.

Melanie Mitchell is Professor of Computer Science at Portland State University, and External Professor and Member of the Science Board at the Santa Fe Institute.

Melanie Mitchell: "AI and the Barrier of Meaning"


Carl Zimmer - Our Viral Future
Popular science writer Carl Zimmer confirms that viruses will always surprise us, for better or worse: the key is to find innovative uses in science and medicine for viruses instead of trying to eradicate them.

Carl Zimmer is a popular science writer and blogger, writing about evolution, medicine, biotechnology, and natural history.

Carl Zimmer: "Our Viral Future"


Robin Hanson - Extraordinary Society of Emulated Minds
Robert Hanson, Associate Professor of Economics at George Mason University, speculates on how systems of class might operate between artificially intelligent machines. Speed and efficiency would be most rewarded, in Hanson's view, while interaction skills with humans would be least valued.

Robin Hanson is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University, a research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University, and Chief Scientist at Consensus Point.

Robin Hanson: "Extraordinary Society of Emulated Minds"


Jaan Tallinn - Why Now? A Quest in Metaphysics
Jaan Tallinn, creator of Skype and Kazaa, narrates a story that explores the notion of existing in multiple places simultaneously.

Jaan Tallinn is one of the programmers behind Kazaa and a founding engineer of Skype. He describes himself as a singularitarian-hacker-investor-physicist (in that order).

Jaan Tallinn: "Why Now? A Quest in Metaphysics"


John Wilbanks - Your Health, Your Data, Your Choices
John Wilbanks, Fellow in Entrepreneurship at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, uses what he learned from a copy of his genotype as a proxy for the possibilities of how people might be able to learn about themselves with usable electronic health records.

John Wilbanks is a Senior Fellow in Entrepreneurship at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, is currently running the Consent to Research project, and studied philosophy at Tulane University.

John Wilbanks: "Your Health, Your Data, Your Choices"


Stuart Armstrong - How We’re Predicting AI
Stuart Armstrong of the Future of Humanity Institute places the quality of predictions about the emergence of artificial intelligence on a continuum with other fields, showing them to be the least accurate.

Stuart Armstrong: "How We’re Predicting AI"


Vernor Vinge - Who’s Afraid of First Movers?
Retired mathematics professor Vernor Vinge describes one pathway toward the technological singularity: by using computers as external brain supplements that allow humans to approach superhuman intelligence.

Vernor Steffen Vinge is a retired San Diego State University (SDSU) Professor of Mathematics, computer scientist, and science fiction author.

Vernor Vinge: "Who’s Afraid of First Movers?"


Peter Norvig - Channeling the Flood of Data
Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google, demonstrates a computer system that has been programmed to organize collections of images from YouTube videos into sets of objects, without any direction from the programmers.

Peter Norvig is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and the Association for Computing Machinery, currently Engineering Director at Google.

Peter Norvig: "Channeling the Flood of Data"

Singularity Summit 2012 - Create the Future

Check out the full videos, here.
Singularity Summit 2012 - Create the Future

The Singularity Summit will draw over 800 thought leaders to San Francisco for discussions on the most revolutionary technological advancements on the horizon.

The annual conference was founded in 2006 by Ray Kurzweil, Peter Thiel, and the Singularity Institute as the first academic symposium for dialogue on the Technological Singularity. The "Singularity" is a term defined by Vernor Vinge meaning greater-than-human intelligence in computers or augmented humans.

Past speakers at Singularity Summit have included Doug Hofstadter (author of Godel, Escher, Bach), Peter Norvig (Google Director of Research), Sebastian Thrun (Stanford AI Lab Director), Rodney Brooks (MIT Professor of Robotics), Justin Rattner (CTO of Intel), and Stephen Wolfram (CEO and Founder of Wolfram Research).

The Technological Singularity | Vernor Vinge | Singularity University

Science Fiction: it has been a muse of geeks, techies and scientists for decades. Many of the technologies we explore on Singularity Hub were first imagined and explored in SF (star trek tricorders, the WWW, robot cars, etc), driving technologists to make them real, which in turn inspires a new round of SF. In thinking about predicting and solving global grand challenges, the storytelling and worldbuilding of SF has much to contribute. Singularity University’s (SU) 1st ever Science Fiction panel took place on July 17th. As a prelude, here’s an interview with Vernor Vinge below, as well as the full footage of his talk about groupminds at SU on June 25, 2012.

Hugo Award-winning science fiction writer Vernor Vinge maintains science fiction is merely a form of scenario based planning about the future of mankind. Vinge, a retired San Diego State University Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science, coined the term “the Singularity” roughly 30 years ago in reference to a time of vastly accelerating technological change. I had a chance to sit down with Vinge and ask him about the Singularity, accelerating technology, and more. Check out the video below:

In outlining various paths to a technological Singularity, Vinge believes scenario based planning is incredibly important when outcomes are uncertain. It gives you a system of symptoms to watch for, so you can plan responses for different sets of symptoms. If you are doing scenario based planning, having a science fiction writer as a loose canon in your next meeting may shake up the committee in a positive way.

Vinge’s scenarios for how humanity could get to a tech singularity are as follows:

1. Pure Artificial Intelligence: The advent of an intelligent superhuman computer.

2. Intelligence Amplification: Take a natural mind, interface it with a computer and make it smarter (popular science fiction author David Brin calls the computer a neo-neo cortex; the machine part allows us to be smart, and the human part provides us with the component we’re good at: wanting things).

3. Computer Networks + Humanity: A phenomenon he calls “groupmind” or social networking, where we achieve superhuman intelligence (at least a functional sort – proceeding at a more robust rate than the others) through coordinated group efforts. An example of this would be Wikipedia.

4. Digital Gaia: A world with ubiquitous microprocessors able to communicate with their neighbors: if every physical object knew what it was, where it was, and could communicate with any other device, the result could be one where the world itself wakes up and becomes its own database.

5. Biomedical improvements in human intelligence lead to better memory and other changes.

Vinge spends the majority of his lecture at Singularity University detailing the taxonomy of groupminds – their qualities in size, origin, focus, hardware/software, longevity, interaction, sociology, design, and implications for his other paths to the singularity. He also talks about outliers – societal makers vs. breakers.

Vinge advises large institutions to understand that when they look at participants in groupminds they are looking at an intellectual resource that dwarfs anything we’d seen in the 20th century. There’s a real chance groupminds will prove worthy competitors, adversaries, and counterparts to social organizations and corporations in many situations . The downsides are that a groupmind may suppress slow thoughtful thinking about problems and may outsource morality. Vinge’s lecture also veers into the philosophical with his thoughts on identity and an individual’s desire for global self-awareness.

Vinge ends his talk on an optimistic note by saying “a post-scarcity economy is not a post-singularity idea: the reach of the mind will always exceed its grasp.” He predicts that even if we continue to experience technological unemployment, “bright sparks of human level intuition, creativity, and insight” will remain. “We’ll always be able to think of projects that are beyond what we can presently do.” Vinge believes with technology it’s possible to become or create creatures that surpass humans in every aspect of intelligence – and perhaps only an extreme physical catastrophe can stop this change.

If science fiction is essentially a scenario, its enormous advantage over other types of scenario based planning is that it can inspire action in its readers, especially when those readers are specialists. If the story emotionally engages the reader, the credentials of the writer do not matter. The specialist (reader) is the one who does the heavy lifting, turning the author’s broad brushstrokes into something that exists in the real world. This is the underappreciated characteristic of science fiction – its ability to move the scientific community to reach across the parameters of possibility.

Source: SH Interviews Vernor Vinge – How Will We Get To The Technological Singularity?

Vernor Vinge - a techno-optimist.


Vernor Vinge on Technological Singularity

The Sensory Effect | Ray Kurzweil

Ray Kurzweil delivers "The Sensory Effect" keynote speech at the NY Tech Meetup. Ray talks about exponential growth, the role that information systems will play in the future of healthcare, artificial intelligence and additional topics.

Ray Kurzweil - "The Sensory Effect"