“Moot” of 4chan Makes Appearance at TED 2010 Wednesday, Feb 10 2010 

Looking over the press release announcing TED, I was surprised to see that “moot”, the founder of 4chan, will be making an appearance there.

You may remember moot as Time’s Most Influential Person of the Year for 2009. Few journalists realize that “Christopher Poole” is just another pseudonym, not his real name. The joke is that Christopher Poole stands for CP, a.k.a. child porn. Moot is covertly trolling the mainstream media by using that name.

Foresight Institute Announces Kartik M. Gada Humanitarian Innovation Prizes Sunday, Jan 31 2010 

From RepRap blog:

The Foresight Institute has announced its Kartik M. Gada Humanitarian Innovation Prize to design and build a better RepRap. There is an interim prize of $20,000, and a grand prize of $80,000. They consulted with the core RepRap team before the announcement and we were initially concerned that the prizes might drive developers to secrecy in order to give themselves a competitive edge. As you will see they have addressed those concerns by making it a condition of winning the prize that solutions should be pre-published and made available under a free licence. For ourselves and on your behalf, we would like to thank the Institute for the enthusiasm that these prizes demonstrate for the RepRap project and for their magnificent generosity.

Congrats to Foresight Institute and Kartik Gada for establishing this interesting and substantial prize. There is another prize, too. Besides the Personal Manufacturing Prize, there is a Water Liberation Prize, described here:

The winner of the Water Liberation Prize of up to $50,000 will be the first person to invent a device that is either solar powered, manually cranked, or otherwise not dependent on the existence of an electrical grid, can produce at least 4 liters of potable (drinkable) water per day, either condensed from the air (as measured in approximate 50% ambient humidity) or filtered through a nanomembrane, and can be mass-produced (as demonstrated by a pilot run of no less than 100 units) for a cost of less than $5 per unit. The filter should be washable and re-usable, without requiring a periodic supply of new filters, as the device may be used in areas without access to a suitable distribution channel.

Foresight 2010 Slides Monday, Jan 18 2010 

Here are the slides from my Foresight presentation, “Don’t Fear the Singularity, but Be Careful: Friendly AI Design”. According to Foresight’s blog, video will be posted later, “funds permitting”. Unfortunately, due to the conference starting late, I had to stop at slide 39 to keep pace with the schedule, but I got most of my important points in. (The only parts that got cut off were my commentary on the recent AAAI Presidential Panel on Long-Term AI Futures and my summary of Singularity Institute work, though I did mention the latter several times.) I would like to record this talk for Vimeo as long as my hardware is high-quality enough to make it look good.

See Brian Wang’s notes on my talk here. Brian provided excellent liveblogging coverage of the entire conference.

With Mencius Moldbug Monday, Jan 18 2010 

Here I am at Foresight 2010 with the notorious political theorist Mencius Moldbug at his first public appearance. Sorry it’s blurry, that’s how these things go. Photograph by Eliezer Yudkowsky.

Here are Moldbug’s reflections on his debate with Robin Hanson at the conference.

Me on FastForward Radio Tonight Tuesday, Dec 15 2009 

Tonight I will be on FastForward Radio with hosts Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon (and possibly Michael Darling?), to talk about Foresight’s upcoming conference on AGI and nanotech where I will be speaking on anthropomorphism in AGI. The infamous Ralph Merkle will be a guest as well. Tune in at:

10:00 Eastern/9:00 Central/8:00 Mountain/7:00 Pacific.

There will also be a chatroom where you can log in, comment on what we say, and ask questions. Listen live at Blog Talk Radio.

AGI-10 Will Be at the University of Lugano in Switzerland Thursday, Dec 3 2009 

Description:

Continuing the mission of the first two AGI conferences (AGI-08, that was held at the University of Memphis; and AGI-09, that was held in Washington DC), in March 2010, AGI-10 will gather an international group of leading academic and industry researchers involved in serious
scientific and engineering work aimed directly toward the goal of artificial general intelligence.

This is the only major conference series devoted wholly and specifically to the creation of AI systems possessing general intelligence at the human level and ultimately beyond. By gathering together active researchers in the field, for presentation of results and discussion of ideas, we accelerate our progress toward our common goal.

Before you try to accelerate progress too much, look into moral philosophy to make sure that your basic assumptions about AI motivations and friendliness make sense!

David’s Photos of Singularity Summit 2009 Wednesday, Dec 2 2009 

David Chalmers has some photos up from behind the scenes at Singularity Summit 2009.

Foresight 2010: the Synergy of Molecular Manufacturing and AGI Monday, Nov 23 2009 

There will be a Foresight 2010 conference on January 16-17th 2010, celebrating the 20th anniversary of the founding of Foresight. The conference will focus on the synergy of molecular manufacturing and AGI. I will be there speaking on behalf of SIAI. See you in Palo Alto.

Singularity Summit 2009 Videos Now Available!!! Monday, Nov 2 2009 

The videos for Singularity Summit 2009 are now available at Vimeo. The few that are missing are either still awaiting confirmation of permission or the speaker asked for video not to be posted of their talk.

Many of the talks are quite excellent. The Singularity Summit 2009 is the most exciting and interdisciplinary conference I have attended in about 6 years of conference-going. Definitely check out the Changing the World panel with Peter Thiel, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Aubrey de Grey:

Changing the World Panel — Singularity Summit 2009 — Peter Thiel, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Aubrey de Grey from Michael Anissimov on Vimeo.

Here’s a great talk by Anders Sandberg:

Anders Sandberg at Singularity Summit 2009 — Technical Roadmap for Whole Brain Emulation from Michael Anissimov on Vimeo.

You can follow along in chronological order by starting at video #1. Here is the accompanying program.

Popular Mechanics on Singularity Summit 2009 Saturday, Oct 10 2009 

Popular Mechanics has coverage of Singularity Summit. Slightly weird coverage, but, uh, whatever. Being exposed to the idea of the Singularity since 2001, I consider it normal and boring (even annoying) rather than weird or fantastic. Homo sapiens surpassed lesser intelligences — why is it such a shocker than Homo sapiens will eventually be surpassed intellectually? I guess it is the hard takeoff version that inspires evaluations of weirdness. Well, if it were physically impossible to develop manufacturing and robotics technology vastly more powerful than human beings, then there would be no hard takeoff, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Humans are midway on the “Great Chain of Being”, which makes sense given that we should expect ourselves to be “typical” intelligences for anthropic reasons.

Quote:

You can see how believable and even plausible a technological singularity seems once you take a few things for granted. If it were possible to improve your memory with a digital device, for example, then everybody would want one, because not having such a device would put you at a disadvantage to those who had such technology. Then an escalation of biodigital enhancement would naturally occur until some people were walking around with more microchips than neurons. At some point the hand off between human intelligence and machine intelligence would have occurred. And that’s just one possible singularity scenario.

Um, duh?

Anders Sandberg Reacts to Singularity Summit 2009 Friday, Oct 9 2009 

Anders Sandberg has a summary of the Summit on his blog. He has a nice shot of the “changing the world” panel with Aubrey de Grey, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Peter Thiel, moderated by Michael Vassar.

Review of Singularity Summit 2009 by Aaron Diaz of Dresden Codak Thursday, Oct 8 2009 

Aaron Diaz, a web cartoonist and creator of the award-winning Dresden Codak, made it out to the Singularity Summit. Here is his review. I had several opportunities to talk to Aaron and even asked him to sign my program. Aaron is part of a small cluster of webcomic artists whose work I enjoy, which includes Nicholas Gurewich, John Campbell, and Josh Lesnick. Though I haven’t read too many webcomics, I can say my favorite is Adventurers.

In his post, Aaron Diaz is surprised that so many transhumanists read his comic. Well, it’s one of the best science-and-transhumanism-themed comics out there, that’s why. I only read a few webcomics, and Dresden Codak is one of them.

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