Archive for July, 2007

Reasons to Focus on Cognitive Technologies

 Posted by Jeriaska on July 31st, 2007

Eliezer Yudkowsky is one of the world’s foremost researchers on Friendly AI and recursive self-improvement. He created the Friendly AI approach to AGI, which emphasizes the importance of the structure of an ethical optimization process and its supergoal, in contrast to the common trend of seeking the right fixed enumeration of ethical rules a moral agent should follow.

In 2001, he published the first technical analysis of motivationally stable goal systems, with his book-length Creating Friendly AI: The Analysis and Design of Benevolent Goal Architectures. In 2002, he wrote “Levels of Organization in General Intelligence,” a paper on the evolutionary psychology of human general intelligence, published in the edited volume Artificial General Intelligence (Springer, 2006). He has two papers forthcoming in the edited volume Global Catastrophic Risks (Oxford, 2007), “Cognitive Biases Potentially Affecting Judgment of Global Risks” and “Artificial Intelligence as a Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk.”

In his Transvision 2007 talk on the power of intelligence, called “Mind Is All That Matters: Reasons to Focus on Cognitive Technologies,” he reminded us that the human brain more than any other development in history has changed the face of the earth, and logically one can expect that improved cognitive technologies will likely have the same dramatic impact on human conception and control over the physical universe.

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Manliness vs. Humanliness

 Posted by Jeriaska on July 29th, 2007

aubrey_future_salonhurlburt_future_salon

Aubrey de Grey and William B. Hurlbut present at the Bay Area Future Salon: July 20, 2007

To live forever is an age-old dream of humankind. Aubrey de Grey thinks it is within our reach and advocates research whose ultimate goal is to make age-related illness and death obsolete. Peter Thiel has supported Aubrey’s research by pledging a matching grant of up to $3.5 million in funds.

Not so fast, says Stanford Neuroscience Professor William B. Hurlbut. Longevity research threatens to disrupt the fragile relationship between the generations, the pace and purpose of our lives and whatnot.

On Friday July 20th both speakers argued their sides of the life extension issue at the Bay Area Future Salon, organized by Mark Finnern and the Acceleration Studies Foundation.

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