Future Current

At the AGI-09 post-conference workshop’s Roadmap Panel,  Itamar Arel of the University of Tennessee announced the founding of a wiki at agi-roadmap.org that will serve as a supplement to the creation of an AGI Roadmap.  Taking as examples several previous, related technology projects, J. Storrs Hall made mention of work conducted by the Foresight Institute on the Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems and Ben Goertzel discussed his participation in the writing of the Metaverse Roadmap.

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When cheap, advanced sensors give rise to ubiquitous monitoring technology, there will be the potential for what David Brin in The Transparent Society and others have called “sousveillance” to become universal. One could envision a future in which everyone was monitoring the activities of everyone else.  At the AGI-09 post-conference workshop, Ben Goertzel presented on a paper with Stephan Bugaj on various scenarios resulting from a future of advanced artificial intelligence that includes sousveillance technologies.

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At the AGI-08 post-conference workshop, Ben Goertzel presented on a paper by the speaker and the Singularity Institute’s director of open source projects, David Hart.  There he described the OpenCog software development framework for integrative artificial general intelligence. The framework’s libraries include a flexible knowledge representation embodied in a scalable knowledge store, a cognitive process scheduler, and a plug-in architecture for allowing interaction between cognitive, perceptual, and control algorithms.

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Ray Kurzweil has received the National Medal of Technology, was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, and has been honored by three U.S. presidents. For the February 21 keynote presentation of the 2008 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, he gave a talk entitled “The Next 20 Years of Gaming” where he discussed the foreseeable ramifications of the accelerating price performance growth of information technologies such as those found in the videogame industry.

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John Smart and Eliezer Yudkowsky at the 2006 Singularity Summit at Stanford

John Smart is a developmental systems theorist who studies accelerating change, computational autonomy, and the singularity. He is President of the Acceleration Studies Foundation, a nonprofit community for research, education, consulting, and selected advocacy of communities and technologies of accelerating change. He also co-produces the Accelerating Change Conference, a meeting of 350 change-leaders and students at Stanford University, and edits ASF’s free newsletter, Accelerating Times, read by future-oriented thinkers around the world. He is a member of the Association of Professional Futurists, the FBI Futures Working Group, and the editorial advisory board of Technological Forecasting and Social Change.

In 2006, he presented the talk “Systems Theories of Accelerating Change” at the Singularity Summit at Stanford. There he looked at accelerating change from universal, biological, human cultural, and technological perspectives, and introduced a few well known and unorthodox ideas in acceleration mechanics.

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In the not too distant future you may be able to buy an inexpensive video camera with the size and aerodynamic characteristics of a mosquito. Even earlier, we will see the proliferation of cameras on lamp posts designed to deter crime. Ultimately, this could lead to a society where nothing is private. At the 2007 Foresight Vision Weekend, Professor David D. Friedman gave an overview of three destabilizing technologies that could usher in a world of ubiquitous surveillance in a preview of his upcoming book Future Imperfect.

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Historical progress isn’t inevitable - the pendulum of history doesn’t have a regular period. Sometimes you get a 500-year Dark Age.  Science fiction novelist, blogger and technology activist Cory Doctorow argued at the 2006 Singularity Summit at Stanford that whether a Singularity or Dark Age comes next is not preordained, but depends on our conscious effort.

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Will artificial intelligence bring about a technological singularity in a soft take off? Ray Kurzweil at the 2006 Singularity Summit at Stanford gave an overview of smooth doubly exponential progressions that he believes could lead to such an outcome. While his projections are considered radical by some observers, it is often because they are thinking linearly and leave out the historically accurate exponential perspective.

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With advanced nanotechnology and machine intelligence on the horizon, we face a future of vast change in our physical world and the world of the mind. But we need not abandon efforts to steer this future toward one which will work for both humans and the biosphere. Christine Peterson identified certain ground conditions needed for such a success in the context of powerful technologies in her 2006 Singularity Summit at Stanford presentation entitlted “Bringing Humanity & the Biosphere Through the Singularity.”

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Attempting to take action now to get ready for a world with strong AI is a highly daunting task. In a world of powerful entities, how can individuals be protected? The open source software experience inspires us to look for ways to transfer the advantages of that process to the physical world. At the 2007 Singularity Summit, Christine Peterson, Founder and Vice President of Foresight Nanotech Institute, discussed the prospects for making physical security “bottom-up”, decentralized, collaborative, and transparent. Read the rest of this entry »

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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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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