At the AGI-08 Conference on Artificial General Intelligence, Ben Goertzel presented on a paper by the speaker and Cassio Pennachin, in which series of hypotheses is proposed, connecting neural structures and dynamics with the formal structures and processes of probabilistic logic. In this framework, Hebbian learning at the synaptic level would be expected to have the implicit consequence of probabilistic deduction at the logical statement level.
Aubrey de Grey is the Chair and Chief Science Officer of the Methuselah Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to combating the aging process. In this talk presented at the February Silicon Valley transhumanist meetup, he outlined the several most notable developments in funding and research taking place at the Methuselah Foundation in late 2007 and early 2008.
Ben Goertzel, AGI-08 organizing committee member and CEO/CSO of Novamente LLC, presented “AI and AGI: Past, Present and Future” during the First Conference on Artificial General Intelligence March 1st, 2008 at the University of Memphis. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) research focuses on the original and ultimate goal of AI–to create intelligence as a whole, by exploring all available paths, including theoretical and experimental computer science, cognitive science, neuroscience, and innovative interdisciplinary methodologies.
Brian Wang and Michael Anissimov at the 2007 Foresight Vision Weekend
Michael Anissimov co-founded the Immortality Institute in 2002, a life extension advocacy organization that today includes hundreds of members and an online community. In 2003, he founded the SF Bay Area Transhumanists. He has also written numerous articles for the Q&A site WiseGEEK, offering “clear answers for common questions” on technology. Michael is Fundraising Director, North America for the Lifeboat Foundation, and serves on the Global Task Force for the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology. At the 2007 Foresight Vision Weekend, he gave a presentation on the measures currently being taken by the Lifeboat Foundation to address existential risks, or possible human extinction event scenarios.
Aubrey de Grey is the editor-in-chief of Rejuvenation Research, a medical journal which publishes cutting-edge work on anti-aging therapies in the laboratory and clinic. At the “Securing the Longevity Dividend” event in Chicago organized by the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, he argued the scientific feasibility of anti-aging therapies by exploring the concept of longevity escape velocity and sharing interim results from research funded by the Methuselah Foundation.
George Dvorsky is the Deputy-Editor of Betterhumans, co-founder and president of the Toronto Transhumanist Association, and the producer of the award-winning Sentient Developments blog and podcast. He is the co-director of the Cyborg Buddha project, and the winner of three 2008 Blogisattva Awards. At the July 23, 2007 Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies conference called “Securing the Longevity Dividend,” he discussed various popular arguments for and against radical life extension.
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.
Ben Goertzel, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Melanie Swan at the Artificial Intelligence and Society event
In everyday life, we underrate the importance of intelligence because our social environment consists only of other humans, yet it is our real trump card as a species and the foundation for everything else we do. The Bayesian statistician I. J. Good proposed that an “intelligence explosion” brought about by an artificial intelligence improving the design of its own intelligence could be expected to reshape the universe more than all human actions up to this point. In January 2008, Eliezer Yudkowsky examined this arguments in an informal presentation of his talk “The Human Importance of the Intelligence Explosion” at the Artificial Intelligence and Society event hosted by the University of Santa Clara and Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence.
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.
Ralph Merkle is a pioneer in public key cryptography and an expert on the emerging technological applications of molecular nanotechnology and cryonics. He is a key member of the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing, part of the Nanofactory Collaboration. In the popular science fiction novel The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson, Dr. Merkle is portrayed as one of the heroes of a future civilization where nanotechnology is ubiquitous. At the CRN conference on the Future of Nano and Bio he spoke on the subject of “A Minimal Toolset for Diamond Mechanosynthesis,” a paper with Robert Freitas on molecular nanotechnology scheduled to be published in JCTN (Journal of Computational and Theoretical Nanoscience).
Anne Corwin is an engineer and technoprogressive activist based in California. She is an intern with the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and a volunteer for the Methuselah Foundation. She is also the author of the blog Existence is Wonderful and produces the associated podcast, Existence is Wonderful audio. In this talk with Accelerating Future’s founder Michael Anissimov, she spoke on how futurist topics like neurodiversity, life extension and self-modification are relevant to discussion today.
