TIME Article on Ray Kurzweil, Singularity Summit, Singularity Institute
Here's the cover. Front-page article.
By Lev Grossman, 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal:
The Singularity isn't just an idea. it attracts people, and those people feel a bond with one another. Together they form a movement, a subculture; Kurzweil calls it a community. Once you decide to take the Singularity seriously, you will find that you have become part of a small but intense and globally distributed hive of like-minded thinkers known as Singularitarians.
Not all of them are Kurzweilians, not by a long chalk. There's room inside Singularitarianism for considerable diversity of opinion about what the Singularity means and when and how it will or won't happen. But Singularitarians share a worldview. They think in terms of deep time, they believe in the power of technology to shape history, they have little interest in the conventional wisdom about anything, and they cannot believe you're walking around living your life and watching TV as if the artificial-intelligence revolution were not about to erupt and change absolutely everything. They have no fear of sounding ridiculous; your ordinary citizen's distaste for apparently absurd ideas is just an example of irrational bias, and Singularitarians have no truck with irrationality. When you enter their mind-space you pass through an extreme gradient in worldview, a hard ontological shear that separates Singularitarians from the common run of humanity. Expect turbulence.
Best article on Ray and the Singularity in general yet, I'm very pleased. Nice to see the words "Kurweilians" and "Singularitarianism" in TIME.
This is currently the #1 most popular article on Time.com. Millions of people must be reading it.
Ray Kurzweil — Transcendent Man LA Screening Tickets Still Available
See this link:
http://www.kurzweilai.net/transcendent-man-tickets-still-available-for-los-angeles
The screenings are at the Laemmle Royal Theater on February 16 and February 17, 2011. The film is directed by Barry Ptolemy.
Immortality Institute Mentioned in Newsweek
I saw that ImmInst was mentioned in Newsweek recently, in an article about Tim Ferriss. Immortality Institute is also mentioned in his new book, which was #1 on Amazon I believe. Here's the bit:
Ferriss is on the bleeding edge of a new trend in self-tracking and experimentation. “It’s happening because almost everyone has a data-gathering device,†he says. “It’s never been easier to gather your own data in an actionable way.†Case in point is one of his former investments, DailyBurn.com, which tracks your diet and workout sessions using an iPhone. Other sites such as CureTogether.com let you open-source clinical trials, so you can see which do-it-yourself experiments work. Meanwhile, new organizations like the Quantified Self and the Immortality Institute are connecting self-experimenters who want to trade data in a centralized fashion.
Tim Ferriss is an interesting fellow. His approach to fitness can simply be summed up as a combination of aggressiveness, self-monitoring, and the scientific method.
Geomagnetic Storm in Progress
In other, potentially civilization-saving news, NSF-affiliated scientists are rolling out the first system that may help predict coronal mass ejections and other solar storms one-to-four days in advance. Would power companies be foresightful enough to shut down the grid for a few days in the instance of a truly major solar storm? We can only hope so.
To search for science on the connection between solar storms and earthquakes, see here. However, I doubt earthquakes are what we should be worried about. Still, did you know that geomagnetic storms and earthquakes have actually been linked?
Aaron Saenz on Artificial General Intelligence
I was just reading about the new AGI company Vicarious on Singularity Hub, and enjoyed this paragraph by Aaron Saenz:
Artificial General Intelligence is one of the Holy Grails of science because it is almost mythical in its promise: not a system that simply learns, but one that reaches and exceeds our own kind of intelligence. A truly new form of advanced life. There are many brilliant people trying to find it. Each of these AI researchers have their own approach, their own expectations, and their own history of failures and a precious few successes. The products you see on the market today are narrow AI – machines that have a very limited ability to learn. As Scott Brown said, “today’s AI technology is so primitive that much of the cleverness goes towards inventing business models that don’t require good algorithms to succeed.†We are in the infantile stages of AGI. If that. Maybe the fetal stages.
I'm not an AGI researcher, but I do hang out with them and talk AGI. Out of everyone I've seen out there so far, the way I think about AGI would be most similar to Josh Tenenbaum. A simple overview of his approach is here.
Converging Technologies Report Gives 2085 as Median Date for Human-Equivalent AI
From the NSF-backed study Converging Technologies in Society: Managing Nano-Info-Cogno-Bio Innovations (2005), on page 344:
2070
48. Scientists will be able to understand and describe human intentions,
beliefs, desires, feelings and motives in terms of well-defined computational
processes. (5.1)2085
50. The computing power and scientific knowledge will exist to build
machines that are functionally equivalent to the human brain. (5.6)
This is the median estimate from 26 participants in the study, mostly scientists.
Only 74 years away! WWII was 66 years ago, for reference. In the scheme of history, that is nothing.
Of course, the queried sample is non-representative of smart people everywhere.
Some Singularity, Superintelligence, and Friendly AI-Related Links
This is a good list of links to bring readers up to speed on some of the issues often discussed on this blog.
Nick Bostrom: Ethical Issues in Advanced Artificial Intelligence
http://www.nickbostrom.com/ethics/ai.html
Nick Bostrom: How Long Before Superintelligence?
http://www.nickbostrom.com/superintelligence.html
Yudkowsky: Why is rapid self-improvement in human-equivalent AI possibly likely?
Part 3 of Levels of Organizational in General Intelligence: Seed AI
http://singinst.org/upload/LOGI/seedAI.html
Anissimov: Relative Advantages of AI, Computer Programs, and the Human Brain
http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/articles/relativeadvantages.htm
Yudkowsky: Creating Friendly AI: "Beyond anthropomorphism"
http://singinst.org/ourresearch/publications/CFAI/anthro.html
Yudkowsky: "Why We Need Friendly AI" (short)
http://www.preventingskynet.com/why-we-need-friendly-ai/
Yudkowsky: "Knowability of FAI" (long)
http://acceleratingfuture.com/wiki/Knowability_Of_FAI
Yudkowsky: A Galilean Dialogue on Friendliness (long)
http://sl4.org/wiki/DialogueOnFriendliness
Stephen Omohundro -- Basic AI Drives
http://selfawaresystems.com/2007/11/30/paper-on-the-basic-ai-drives/
http://selfawaresystems.com/2009/02/18/agi-08-talk-the-basic-ai-drives/ (video)
Links on Friendly AI
http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/2006/09/consolidation-of-links-on-friendly-ai/
Anissimov: Yes, the Singularity is the Biggest Threat to Humanity
http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/2011/01/yes-the-singularity-is-the-biggest-threat-to-humanity/
Abstract of a talk I'm giving soon
http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/2011/01/my-upcoming-talk-in-texas-anthropomorphism-and-moral-realism-in-advanced-artificial-intelligence/
Most recent SIAI publications:
http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/2010/12/new-singularity-institute-publications-in-2010/
More posts from this blog
http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/2010/06/the-world-the-singularity-creates-could-destroy-all-value/
http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/2010/06/reducing-long-term-catastrophic-artificial-intelligence-risk/
http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/2009/10/answering-popular-sciences-10-questions-on-the-singularity/
http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/2009/09/is-smarter-than-human-intelligence-possible/
http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/2009/04/interview-with-singularity-institute-president-michael-vassar/
http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/2009/03/technological-singularitysuperintelligencefriendly-ai-concerns/
GOOD magazine miniseries on the Singularity
http://www.good.is/post/singularity-101-what-is-the-singularity/
I’m Quoted on Friendly AI in the United Church Observer
This magazine circulates to 60,000 Canadian Christians. It's not a stupid publication just because it's Christian... atheist Digg/Reddit geeks (80% of the audience of this blog, I'd wager) need to broaden their horizons just a bit. Remember that Christians and other Theologians can think and say many intelligent things because they compartmentalize their thinking effectively. The topic of the article is friendly AI, and many people already said that they thought this was one of the best mainstream media articles on the topic because it doesn't take a simplistic angle and actually probes the technical issues.
Here's the bit with me in it:
Nevertheless, technologists are busy fleshing out the idea of “friendly AI†in order to safeguard humanity. The theory goes like this: if AI computer code is steeped in pacifist values from the very beginning, super-intelligence won’t rewrite itself into a destroyer of humans. “We need to specify every bit of code, at least until the AI starts writing its own code,†says Michael Anissimov, media director for the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a San Francisco think-tank dedicated to the advancement of beneficial technology. “This way, it’ll have a moral goal system more similar to Gandhi than Hitler, for instance.â€
Many people who naively talk about AI and superintelligence act like superintelligence will certainly do X or Y (of course there are all sorts of intuitive camps, "they'll just leave us alone and go into space" is a popular sentiment) no matter what the initial conditions, implying that trying to set the initial conditions doesn't matter.
Would you rather have an AI with initial motivations closer to Gandhi or Hitler? If you have any preference, then you've just demonstrated concern for the Friendly AI problem. It's remarkable that I actually have a challenging time arguing on a daily basis that an AI with more in common with Gandhi would be better to build first than one with more in common with Hitler, but it's true.
Some people say, "but, whatever initial programming it has will be gone after many cycles of self-improvement". No, not necessarily, because the AI will be making its own programming changes. It will dictate its goal structure, not outside forces. More like a being creating itself than an evolution-made being with a goal system filled with strange attractors that flip back and forth depending on immediate context (humans).
Setting the initial conditions for AI properly is probably the most important task humanity faces, because AGI seems more likely to reach superintelligence first than human intelligence enhancement, despite the better science fiction movie potential and personal/tribal identification possibilities of the latter. John Smart presents a few good reasons why this is likely in his Limits to Biology essay.