Future Current

Today’s software has been criticized for being buggy and insecure, both too expensive and time-consuming to create. As computers become more complex and parallel, today’s development paradigm appears increasingly incapable of matching the pace of accelerating technological change. Stephen Omohundro of Self-Aware Systems describes in his October 24, 2007 Stanford University Computer Systems Colloquium a new approach to “software synthesis,” in which artificially intelligent machines take over many of the tasks of software development. The approach is based on “self-improving systems” which improve themselves by learning from their own operation. These same systems have the potential to develop radically improved hardware based on nanotechnology, leading to profound technological and social consequences.

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Stephen Omohundro has had a wide-ranging career as a scientist, university professor, author, software architect, and entrepreneur. At the 2007 Singularity Summit hosted by the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, he asked whether we can design intelligent systems that embody our values, even after many generations of self-improvement. His talk demonstrates that self-improving systems will converge on a cognitive architecture first described in von Neumann’s work on the foundations of microeconomics. He shows that these systems will have drives toward efficiency, self-preservation, acquisition, and creativity, and that these are likely to lead to both desirable and undesirable behaviors unless we design them with great care.

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Steve Jurvetson is a Managing Director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, a leading venture capital firm with affiliate offices around the world. He was the founding VC investor in Hotmail (MSFT), Interwoven (IWOV), and Kana (KANA). In September of 2007 he presented a talk at the Singularity Summit in San Francisco hosted by the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence called “Dichotomy of Designed and Evolutionary Paths to AI Futures.” There he asked how the first general artificial intelligence that exceeds human intelligence will be built. Some technologists advocate design, while others prefer evolutionary search algorithms. Still others would selectively conflate the two, hoping to incorporate the best of both paradigms while avoiding their limitations. But while both processes are powerful, they are very different, and they are not easily combined. Rather, they present divergent paths.

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Sam Adams is an IBM Distinguished Engineer within IBM’s Research Division. He argued in his 2007 Singularity Summit presentation that if we are ever to achieve computer systems that construct and maintain their own sense of meaning about the world, we must discover a way to imbue computing systems with real understanding, human-style semantics, and the commonsense reasoning of the human child at the very least. His talk presents evidence for its attainment in Artificial General Intelligence, as well as discussing its implications.

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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. At the 2007 Singularity Summit, he introduced three schools of thought currently associated with the word “Singularity,” their core arguments and bolder conjectures, while noting where they support or contradict each other.

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The Methuselah Foundation held an informal dinner conversation on October 19 to discuss the effort to secure biotechnological strategies for engineered negligible senescence. Questions were fielded by Aubrey de Grey, Chairman and Chief Science Officer of the Methuselah Foundation. Continued from “The Effort to Postpone Frailty Indefinitely“

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The Methuselah Foundation held an informal dinner conversation on October 19 to discuss the effort to secure biotechnological strategies for engineered negligible senescence. Questions were fielded by Aubrey de Grey, Chairman and Chief Science Officer of the Methuselah Foundation. Participants included Jeffrey Hall, Executive Director of SENS, and Allison Taguchi, the Development Officer of the Methuselah Foundation. The event itself was organized by Bruce Klein and Susan Fonseca-Klein of the Immortality Institute.

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On October 10, a Facebook group composed of Silicon Valley residents met for an informal dinner conversation with Singularity Institute Co-Founder and Research Fellow Eliezer Yudkowsky. The topic was the future of intelligence: Before we can have any understanding of what to expect if the future contains minds far more intelligent than we are, we might consider what it is that makes a mind intelligent in the first place.

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Alcor Chief Administrative Officer Jennifer Chapman and Chief Operating Officer Tanya Jones

Tanya Jones has participated in the cryopreservation of over half of Alcor’s 78 cryopreserved patients. She started her career at the life extension organization over a decade ago and her experience as the Chief Operating Officer is effectuating innovative change within the organization. As the leader of Alcor’s emergency response capability, she is actively responsible for elevating the level of care. She shared details of present-day initiatives to provide the state-of-the art in cryonics technology at the 7th Alcor Conference.

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James Van Ehr is the founder and chairman of Zyvex Performance Materials, Zyvex Instruments, Zyvex Labs and Zyvex Asia. He founded the Texas Nanotechnology Initiative and the Feynman Grand Prize in nanotechnology and his $3.5 million grant established at the University of Texas at Dallas NanoTech Institute. He has also endowed the James Van Ehr Distinguished Chair of Science and Technology at the University of Texas at Dallas held by the late Nobel Laureate Dr. Alan G. MacDiarmid.  At CRN’s conference on the Future of Nano and Bio, he spoke to the challenges and opportunities attending the commercialization of nanotechnology.

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Jamais Cascio writes about the intersection of emerging technologies and cultural transformation, and specializes in the design and creation of plausible scenarios of the future. A recurring theme in his writing is the importance of openness, transparency, and flexibility as a toolkit for social and technological progress.  His 2007 Singularity Summit presentation focused on the spectrum of technologies encompassed by the term “Metaverse.” Building on his work in the recently-published Metaverse Roadmap Overview, he traces how each of the four Metaverse scenarios – Augmented Reality, Lifelogging, Virtual Worlds, and Mirror World – lead to different types of Singularities.

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Dr. Michael West serves as President and Chief Scientific Officer of Advanced Cell Technology and is Adjunct Professor of Bioengineering at the University of California, Berkeley. He has extensive academic and business experience in age-related degenerative diseases, telomerase molecular biology and human embryonic stem cell research and development. He founded Geron Corporation of Menlo Park, California and from 1990 to 1998 he was a Director and Vice President, where he initiated and managed programs in telomerase diagnostics, oligonucleotide-based telomerase inhibition as anti-tumor therapy, and the cloning and use of telomerase in telomerase-mediated therapy wherein telomerase is utilized to immortalize human cells. At the 7th Alcor Conference he gave a presentation on the prospect of regenerative medicine.

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