Accelerating Future Transhumanism, AI, nanotech, the Singularity, and extinction risk.

Natasha Vita-More, Doug Lenat, and Michael Vassar to Speak at SXSW

SXSW March 14, 2011 http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/event_IAP5705 "The SINGULARITY: Humanity's Huge Techno Challenge". Speakers in alphabetical order are: Doug Lenat, CEO Cyborp, Michael Vassar, President Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and Natasha Vita-More, Vice Chair, Humanity+.

Panel Chair: Natasha Vita-More asks the question: Will supercomputing intelligences outsmart human-level intelligence? Ray Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines is the world's most known advocacy of a technology breakthrough that will change the face of humanity and the world. Kurzweil claims that the accelerating, exponential growth of technology will result in a Singularity. But not all technological luminaries agree with Kurzweil. In fact, some suggest nanotechnology as superseding artificial intelligence. Others argue for humanity's future as being located in biosynthetics and virtuality. Outside the technological sphere, a new culture of DIY citizen scientists could either speed up or halt the Singularity. With a finger on the pulse, ethicists and policy-makers are arguing for a new strategy for assessing our possible futures. This panel dissects the very core of the Singularity, if and when it will occur, and what we can expect to happen.

Speakers' statements:

Natasha: The Singularity is presumed to be an event that happens to us rather than an opportunity to boost human cognitive abilities. The very same technology that proposes to build superintelligences could also dramatically enhance human cognition. Rather than looking at the Singularity as a fata compli birthing of superintelligences that might foster human extinction risk, an alternative theory forms an intervention between human and technology. First, the field of cybernetics established a blueprint for control, feedback and adaptation. Brain-computer interactions established engineering protocols for artificial intelligence. Later, the invention of wearable computers cultivated objects as embellishments to our biology and the genesis of human-computer interaction has had an evolutionary affect on bio-morphology. Now, the coincidental and subsequent developments of inventive projects arrived at through digital media, virtuality, and immersivity have furthered the scope of human experiential enhancement as artificial intelligence technologies are fostering arguably viable developments. This overlap of computational and physical forms an evolutionary crossing point. Could the human become a super AI.

Doug: Computing technology is on the verge of achieving full human-brain scale (in terms of the number, density, speed, volume, etc. of interconnected elements on the scale of complexity of a neuron). But I believe this is neither necessary nor sufficient to trigger The Technological Singularity. The bottleneck is software, not hardware. IBM's WATSON won its Jeopardy challenge match, but it got absurd wrong answers to some of the questions; it's not like this problem would go away if only IBM adds another 2000 processors, or more memory, or faster disks. The limitations of WATSON, Google, SIRI, etc. are ones of breadth of inference, not quantitative performance metrics. Imagine a game of Jeopardy where all the clues were very easy, even for children, but required them to do one or two steps of reasoning to figure out the right response. Building a program to play that game well is the "missing link" between where technology is today and true AI -- and true AI is what will trigger the Singularity. For many years now, dozens of us have been building CYC, a repository for the common sense knowledge and general inferencing strategies that comprise that missing link. If we kept on building it manually, at the current rate, it might take us another three centuries to complete. But in a way, we are on the verge of a sort of Singularity in the building of CYC: it now knows enough, and can infer enough, to carry on interactive dialogues in English, opening up the possibility of having millions of people helping it to cross that finish line in 2012, not 2312.

Michael: My work is focused on the exploration and integration of the visions of the Technological Singularity developed by Vernor Vinge, Raymond Kurzweil and Eliezer Yudkowsky. These emphasize the successive impacts of the creation of superhumanly intelligent organizational forms enabled by AI theory, the acceleration of economic, scientific and social change that narrow AI and biotech will enable within the context of those organizational forms, and recursively self-modifying general artificial intelligence, respectively. I associate these visions of the Singularity with three stages in the likely evolution of information processing, the combined impact of which will most likely make the 22nd century resemble the 20th less closely than the 20th century resembles the Cambrian. The earliest, Vingean stage is of particular importance, because the development of superhuman collective intelligences is likely to mark the end of the period during which deliberate human decision making can enable human values to directly influence humanity's future.