New Singularity Institute Publications in 2010

Here’s the source.

Basic AI Drives and Catastophic Risks (Carl Shulman, 2010) Coherent Extrapolated Volition: A Meta-Level Approach to Machine Ethics (Nick Tarleton, 2010) Economic Implications of Software Minds (S. Kaas, S. Rayhawk, A. Salamon and P. Salamon, 2010) From mostly harmless to civilization-threatening: pathways to dangerous artificial general intelligences (Kaj Sotala, 2010) Implications of a software‐limited singularity (Carl Shulman, Anders Sandberg, 2010) Superintelligence does not imply benevolence (Joshua Fox, Carl Shulman, 2010) Timeless Decision Theory (Eliezer Yudkowsky, 2010)

The above are papers, below are presentations:

How intelligible is intelligence? (Anna Salamon, Stephen Rayhawk, Janos Kramar, 2010) Whole Brain Emulation and the Evolution of Superorganisms (Carl Shulman, 2010) What can evolution tell us about the feasibility of artificial intelligence? (Carl Shulman, 2010)

If you value this research, donate to the Singularity Institute via Paypal, and your donation will be matched. At Less Wrong, various users are announcing the level of their contributions. The user …

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Singularity Summit 2009 Featured in Carl Zimmer Article in Scientific American

Carl Zimmer wrote this: “Can You Live Forever? Maybe Not — But You Can Have Fun Trying“. This is a very positive, yet slightly skeptical look at the Singularity movement. This article is a follow-up to Zimmer’s earlier article in Playboy, which came out this January. This year, there have been articles on the Singularity Summit and Singularity Institute in Playboy, GQ, the UK Independent, and Scientific American. Here’s a funny bit from the current article:

After the meeting I decided to visit to researchers working on the type of technology that people such as Kurzweil consider the steppingstones to the Singularity. Not one of them takes Kurzweil’s own vision of the future seriously. We will not have some sort of cybernetic immortality in the next few decades. The human brain is far too mysterious and computers far too crude for such a union anytime soon, if ever. In fact some scientists regard all this talk of the Singularity as a reckless promise of false hope to the afflicted.

But when I asked these skeptics about …

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Kurzweil Reveals an In-Depth Analysis of His Predictions for 2009 in Letter to IEEE Spectrum

In a recent letter written to John Rennie responding to his recent critique of Ray’s predictions, Kurzweil defended himself and his predictions, and most importantly, linked to this. This huge document is over 150 pages long and packed with cool images and facts.

Kurzweil hits back at Rennie:

While I appreciate some of the things John Rennie has to say, his review of my predictions is filled with inaccuracies, including misquotes of mine, and misunderstandings of the meaning of my words and the reality of today’s technology. For starters, he takes note of my point about selection bias, but his entire article suffers from this bias. While he acknowledges that I wrote over 100 predictions for 2009, in a book I wrote in the late 1990s, he only talks about a handful of them. And he persistently gets these wrong. He writes that I predicted “widespread, foolproof, real-time speech translation.” We do in fact have real-time speech translation in the form of popular phone apps. But who ever said anything about “foolproof?” Rennie …

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Yudkowsky’s Story “X17″

There’s a very short story of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s I enjoy, X17. It contrasts the creation of a transhuman as seen in naive fiction with another view.

The key point is questioning the continuity of values between humanity and transhumanity. When people initially hear about transhumanity, they are often fed an overoptimistic story which is hand-tuned to avoid backlash and serious argument. Thus, most transhumanists are stuck in a happy fantasy land where their subjective probability of a transition to transhumanity leading to serious problems for most or all humans is extremely low. Part of the problem, I think, is viewing transhumanism as just another set of technologies, like the steam engine, rather than the creation of novel agents possibly with human-indifferent goals. Combine human indifference and vast power and the world could become unpleasant for us very quickly.

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Marvin Minsky Quote on Randomness in AI

I found this on Marvin Minsky’s Wikipedia page:

Minsky is an actor in an artificial intelligence koan (attributed to his student, Danny Hillis) from the Jargon file:

In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6. “What are you doing?” asked Minsky. “I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-tac-toe,” Sussman replied. “Why is the net wired randomly?”, asked Minsky. “I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play,” Sussman said. Minsky then shut his eyes. “Why do you close your eyes?” Sussman asked his teacher. “So that the room will be empty.” At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.

What I actually said was, “If you wire it randomly, it will still have preconceptions of how to play. But you just won’t know what those preconceptions are.” –Marvin Minsky

I’m actually sort of pleased that so many folks in Artificial Intelligence somehow believe in the power of total randomness. It will hold them back from success, giving more time for …

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Some Singularity Summit 2010 Videos Now Online

Tooby, Goertzel, Yudkowsky & Legg panel: Narrow and General Intelligence from Singularity Institute on Vimeo.

We’re starting to upload videos from Singularity Summit 2010 which have been edited. Greg Stock and Ramez Naam are currently being edited and should be uploaded soon, then as many others as we can. Hopefully all should be uploaded in the next two weeks. Singularity Hub has additional coverage.

This was a great conference, and as always my favorite conference to attend. I really think our conference is the best — we include scientists working on the most groundbreaking work in converging technologies and human enhancement. Pretty soon we’ll begin planning for 2011′s Singularity Summit. It’s a pleasure to work on a conference that actually means something for the future of humanity. The way the world looks in 2100 very much depends on how we make crucial choices in the first half of this century.

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The Whiskerwheel — Flexible Locomotion

I have a fairly simple idea for a new kind of wheel that I will describe to you now. It’s not really possible to build a very good one with today’s technology, but it seems as if it could be possible with more advanced fullerene-based robotics.

I got the idea for this wheel while reading about Usain Bolt and the possible limits of human speed. One of the obvious factors that determines speed is the total amount of force applied to the ground per time interval. Humans and other animals with legs can only contact the ground as many times as they have legs per running cycle, limiting the amount of force they can apply.

The classic workaround to this limitation is the wheel, which can apply constant force to the ground as long as its power source holds out. Of course, the wheel has its weaknesses. A wheel can’t operate efficiently over uneven ground, and can’t scale certain obstacles. The solution is to create a “wheel” that consists of a bundle of tentacles, or “whiskers” which …

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Skype Co-Founder Jaan Tallinn on His Life: “Soviets and the Singularity”

Jaan Tallinn From Soviet to Singularity from Aaltoes on Vimeo.

Jaan Tallinn tells us a story about his life, and how he’s come to see the Singularity as an important challenge facing mankind.

The video was posted at the Aalto Entrepreneur Society website. Jaan also recently did an interview with the 2nd biggest newspaper in Estonia, here’s Google’s English translation.

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