Please email us with your thoughts
November 15th, 2008 –
The Convergence08 Unconference will be happening this weekend.
If you can’t attend, follow the details live this Saturday and Sunday at FastForward Radio, presented by The Speculist.
November 9th, 2008 –
Thomas B. Edsall at the Huffington Post writes about the role of (narrow) AI in the recent financial crisis. He interviews Dr. Ben Goertzel, SIAI Director of Research; as well as Ray Kurzweil, member of the SIAI Board of Directors; with a mention of SIAI Research Fellow Eliezer Yudkowsky, in “Man Versus Machine.”
November 3rd, 2008 –
SIAI Research Fellow Eliezer Yudkowsky spoke with Jaron Lanier, virtual reality pioneer and Interdisciplinary Scholar-in-Residence at the University of California Berkeley, in “Science Saturday: Dreaming of an Artificial Intelligence”, at Bloggingheads.tv.
October 31st, 2008 –
SIAI Director of Research Dr. Ben Goertzel is co-organizing a Workshop on Machine Consciousness, which will be held in Hong Kong in June 2009.
It is colocated with a larger, interdisciplinary conference on consciousness research, Toward a Science of Consciousness 2009.
Note also that the date for submitting papers to AGI-09 has been extended, by popular demand, till November 12. AGI-09 will welcome quality papers on any strong-AI related topics.
October 22nd, 2008 –
SIAI Director of Research Dr. Ben Goertzel reports on his participation in a recent workshop.
“I just returned from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where I attended a weekend workshop on Evaluation and Metrics for Human-Level AI, sponsored by the Office of Naval Research and co-chaired by John Laird from the University of Michigan (who is a leader of the SOAR project, a long-standing project aimed at human-level AI, and pursued both in academia and, via Soartech, in industry) and Pat Langley from Arizona State University (who has a long and diverse history of achievement in the AI field, and has recently introduced the Icarus integrative AI system).
“Rather than a typical academic workshop focused on the presenting of papers, this was a ‘working workshop’ devoted to discussions aimed at collectively generating and filtering ideas regarding appropriate environments and tasks for software systems aimed at human-level AI. There will likely be a followup workshop early next year, focused more tightly on the description of specific environments and tasks; this one was more of a careful exploration of the relevant conceptual landscape, and a review of various requirements to be fulfilled and pitfalls to be avoided.
“Joscha Bach (creater of the MicroPsi AGI system) and I were the most radical optimists present, both of us believing it likely that with sufficient dedication of resources, human-level AI could plausibly be created within a decade. Most of the other participants believed it would take longer — but all considered human-level AI a valid and important area on which to focus current research attention.
“Among many other topics, there was some discussion of my proposal of an ‘AGI Preschool,’ which is summarized in ‘Intelligence Assessment for Early-Stage Software Systems Aimed at Human-Level, Roughly Human-Like AGI.’ Time permitting, some of the workshop participants may write a report of the main conclusions reached and submit it for publication.”
October 22nd, 2008 –
Join us this Saturday, October 25 in San Jose, CA, for the premier event on the Singularity:
…and 11 other presenters
The Singularity Summit is the leading forum on the Singularity. The first Singularity Summit was held at Stanford University in 2006 to further understanding and discussion about the Singularity concept and the future of technological progress. It was founded by Tyler Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, and Peter Thiel as a venue for leading thinkers to explore the subject, whether scientist, enthusiast, or skeptic. The Singularity Institute hosts the summit annually.
A slide presentation on the Summit is here.
Click here to register and save $75 off your ticket.
October 15th, 2008 –
SIAI Research Fellow Eliezer Yudkowsky will speak at the workshop Global Catastropic Risk: Building a Resilient Civilization on Nov. 14 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.
Organized by the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology and the Lifeboat Foundation, this workshop will address threats to the future of humanity, natural and man-made, and the steps we can take to reduce the risks and build a more resilient civilization.
It will precede Convergence 08, November 15-16 at the same venue, co-sponsored by the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence.
October 1st, 2008 –
Peter de Blanc, 2006 summer intern at the Singularity Institute and now with the Temple University Department of Mathematics, has posted an article titled “Convergence of Expected Utilities with Algorithmic Probability Distributions.”
The formal mathematical proof in this paper has important implications for the question of whether a perfect rational agent — including some future Friendly Artificial Intelligence — can truly put the same value on each sentient life even when astronomical numbers stand to be harmed, something we humans fail so miserably to do.
September 22nd, 2008 –
I spent a while this weekend thinking about what might be the right approach for testing the intelligence of early-stage AGI systems that are aimed at human-level, roughly human-like general intelligence (either as an end goal or an intermediate developmental milestone).
Some of my thoughts are summed up in an essay I posted at
http://goertzel.org/agiq.pdf
I’ll quote the first few paragraphs here:
One of the many difficult issues arising in the course of research on human-level
AGI is that of “evaluation and metrics” – i.e., AGI intelligence testing.
It’s not so hard to tell when you’ve achieved human-level AGI — though there is
some subtlety here, which I’ll discuss below. However, assessing the quality of
incremental progress toward human-level AGI is a much subtler matter. In this essay I’ll
present some thoughts on this issue, culminating in a couple specific proposals:
1) Online School Tests, in which AGIs are tested via their ability to succeed in
existing online educational fora
2) of more immediate interest, a series of tests called the AGI Preschool Tests (AIP
Tests, for short, pronounced “ape tests”), based on the notion of “multiple intelligences”
and also on some novel ideas regarding learning-based intelligence testing.
The AIP Tests suggested here are specifically intended for AGI systems that
control agents embodied in 3D worlds resembling the everyday human world, via either
physical robots or virtually embodied agents. Very differently embodied AGI systems
(e.g. systems to be initially taught purely via text without any simulated human-like or
animal-like body) would potentially need qualitatively different testing methdologies.
…
September 19th, 2008 –
PALO ALTO, CA, September 17, 2008 – The Convergence08 Unconference on Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno (NBIC) technologies and their interactions will be held November 15-16, 2008, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. The event will use an innovative “unconference” format to enable participants to customize the event in a highly interactive way.
Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley forecaster with over two decades experience exploring long-term technological change and its practical impact on business and society, will keynote the event. About Convergence08, he observed, “A host of technologies that seemed like daring science fiction just a few years ago are racing toward practical application with breathtaking speed. Convergence08 is a unique opportunity to look into the coming NBIC future, examine its implications, and prepare for the vast surprises in store for us all.”
Both days feature debates on controversial NBIC topics including Synthetic Biology, Longevity, and Artificial Intelligence. Dr. Barney Pell, founder of Powerset and search strategist and evangelist at Microsoft, stated, “At this event we aim to use the power of collective intelligence to see farther along the convergence trajectories; each of the NBIC technologies is transformative on its own, and there’s a strong interplay among them.”
Headliners include:
Registration details available at http://www.convergence08.org/register/.
ABOUT CONVERGENCE08
Sponsored by organizations focused on innovative technologies, Convergence08 will bring together an eclectic mix of visionaries, entrepreneurs, scientists, technologists, and independent thinkers to merge their distributed knowledge into an improved view of where the NBIC revolutions are taking us, how to maximize benefits to humanity and the environment, and how to minimize any downsides.
Convergence08 Supporting Organizations include Acceleration Studies Foundation, Foresight Nanotech Institute, Humanity+, ImmInst.org, Long Now Foundation, and Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Cooperating Organizations include CyBeRev, Millennium Project, and Reason Foundation.
Convergence08 is co-chaired by James Clement (Humanity+ Executive Director), Tyler Emerson (Singularity Institute Executive Director), and Christine Peterson (Foresight Nanotech Institute Cofounder and President).
