Wendell Wallach is a lecturer and consultant at Yale University’s Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics. He is recognized as one of the leaders in the new field of Machine Ethics, and designed the first course anywhere on this subject, which he has taught twice at Yale. Machine Morality: From Aristotle to Asimov and Beyond, which he is co-authoring and which will be published by MIT Press, explores the prospects for designing computer systems capable of making moral decisions.
Photo courtesy of Renee Blodgett
Peter Thiel is the founder and president of Clarium Capital Management LLC, a global macro hedge fund managing $2 billion in assets and which has returned 240% since its inception in October 2002. In 2005, Clarium was honored by both MarHedge and Absolute Return as the global macro fund of the year. At the 2007 Singularity Summit hosted by the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, he observed that over the past three decades, financial markets experienced the largest and most violent series of booms and busts in history. Nothing in the orthodox literature predicted the market gyrations of the recent past. One distinct possibility is that the epochal shift the market senses but cannot identify is the arrival of the singularity as the transformational technological event of our time.
Brian Wang is a member of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology‘s Global Implications and Policy Task Force and a scientific advisory board member of the Lifeboat Foundation. At the 2007 Foresight Vision Weekend Unconference, he gave a presentation called “Converging Technology.” The talk presented proposals for using previously unrelated technologies together for mining the ocean’s $720 trillion in uranium, while further examples of converging technology proposed for revolutionizing space capabilities at lower cost while reducing risk.
Virtual worlds can be described as open-ended video game or 3D chat room environments connected over the Internet where participants may have the freedom to build the world, their avatars and structure all activities and interactions. Second Life is the largest virtual world to date with over 10 million registered users and a concurrency of 30,000 – 40,000 (the number of people in-world simultaneously at any time). The economy is routinely over $1 million U.S. dollars per day.
As with any new medium, digital world participants have at first attempted to replicate physical world activities such as building houses, offices, stores and other familiar landscapes, introducing social interaction mechanisms and constructing commercial marketplaces for products and services. A new phase then occurs with a fuller exploration of the medium and a creation of concepts unique to digital environments. Featured innovations include simultaneous worldwide interaction with automatic translation, multi-threaded communication and novel collaboration in group settings, and the ability to filter and structure personal views.
In her presentation at the Foresight Vision Weekend Unconference, Melanie Swan shared an interactive overview of the current status and use of virtual worlds, including a recent standards announcement, and a review of the Metaverse Roadmap released in September 2007.
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J. Storrs Hall is an independent scientist and author. His latest book is Beyond AI: Creating the Conscience of the Machine. It follows Nanofuture: What’s Next for Nanotechnology, which received the Foresight Institute’s Communications Prize and Drew University’s Bela Kornitzer Prize. At the 2007 Singularity Summit, he offered a revised notion of robotic morality, one based on an understanding of the evolutionary origins of human morals and ethics.
Neil Jacobstein is chairman and CEO of Teknowledge Corporation, a 25-year old software company. Since 1992, he has served as chairman of the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing, a not-for-profit research group focused on the long-term feasibility, embedded safeguards, and applications of molecular nantotechnology. He was the leading co-author of the Foresight Guidelines for Responsible Nanotechnology Development and is a senior research fellow in the Digital Visions Program at Stanford University. At the 2007 Singularity Summit, he spoke to how early stage artificial intelligence has already produced a wide range of valuable knowledge systems applications in industry and government.
James Hughes serves as the executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, where he produces the weekly syndicated public affairs talk show Changesurfer Radio. He is the author of Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future, and is working on a second book on neurotechnology, tentatively titled Cyborg Buddha: Using Neurotechnologies to Enhance Virtue. In September of 2007 he spoke at the Singularity Summit in San Francisco. There he argued that sentient, self-willed, greater-than-human machine minds are very likely in the coming fifty years. But to ensure that they don’t threaten the welfare of the rest of the minds on the planet a number of steps need to be taken.
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. Continued from “Self-Improving AI: The Future of Computing.”
