Future Current

Ben Goertzel is Director of Research for the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, responsible for overseeing the direction of the organization’s research division. He has over 70 publications, concentrating on cognitive science and AI, including Chaotic Logic, Creating Internet Intelligence, Artificial General Intelligence (edited with Cassio Pennachin), and The Hidden Pattern, and is the chief science officer and acting CEO of Novamente, a software company aimed at creating applications in the area of natural language question-answering. At the 2007 Singularity Summit, he discussed the current prototype work involved in the release of intelligent agents controlled by the Novamente AI Engine in Second Life and other virtual worlds.

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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 »

Peter Norvig is the Director of Research at Google Inc, where he has been since 2001. From 2002-2005 he was Director of Search Quality, the manager of record responsible for answering more queries than anyone else in the history of the world. He is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and the Association for Computing Machinery and co-author of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, the leading textbook in the field. In his keynote speech at the 2007 Singularity Summit, he argued that the invention of new technology is limited only by the laws of science and by the degree of ingenuity in the lab. But the proliferation of new technology into everyday life is a complex social process involving entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, international corporations, politicians, consumers, and dumb luck.

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Charles L. Harper, Jr. is Senior Vice President of the John Templeton Foundation. He has worked to transform philanthropy by developing innovative entrepreneurial practices in grant making, and has created more than $200 million in grant-based programs ranging widely from the study of forgiveness and reconciliation, to enterprise-based solutions for poverty, and projects in chemistry, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, medicine, and the philosophy of science. At the 2007 Singularity Summit, he spoke on the dilemma of power, which describes how science and technology are seen to create new forms of power rapidly, whereas cultures and civilizations do not so easily create the parallel capacities of benevolent stewardship.

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Barney Pell is the founder of Powerset, a stealth-stage startup developing advanced AI technologies to deliver breakthroughs in search and navigation. In his 2007 Singularity Summit presentation he offered a framework for comparing different approaches to artificial general intelligence, in which we view any intelligent behavior as a combination of architecture and development, both of which can be characterized as more or less human-brain-like.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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