The Lamisphere

On November 15th and 16th, a remarkable un-conference will take place.  Convergence 08 is being hosted at The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.  The event is sponsored by a group  of long-term-philanthropy non-profits: The Foresight Institute, Humanity +, Imminst.org, The Singularity Institute, The Long Now Foundation, The Methuselah Foundation, and CyBeRev.

Paul Saffo keynotes, and three panels have been programmed.  The rest of the scheduled two days is left to the attendees to collaborate on topics of relevance to the community.  The three panels, posed as “debates”, are focused on synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, and longevity intervention.

I have the distinct pleasure of moderating the artificial intelligence debate which brings together four leading thinkers in this area:

• Ben Goertzel, Novamente, Singularity Institute
• Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google
• Steve Omohundro, Self-Aware Systems
• Barney Pell, Founder of Powerset, Strategist at Microsoft

For one hour, we will a conduct a very different AI debate: not whether to create AI, or which technical path will work fastest, but “How can we use AI technology to build the world we want to live in?”

Some of the things I want to know:

• Technology policy and politics:  What advice do you have to President-elect Obama on the future of technology enhanced humanity?
• Haves vs. have-nots:  Is there a growing gap between haves and have-nots?  If so, should we look towards AI to address it?
• Potential outcomes:  Viewing the distribution of future outcomes (imagine a normal distribution), it seems that accelerating technology capability will push probabilities towards the tails:  Exceedingly wonderful or terrible.  How can we use AI technology to push towards a favorable outcome for humanity?
• Governance mechanisms:  I heard a commentator say that this just past election will likely be the most important election of our lifetime.  What about the election of 2048 that pits enhanced human vs. sentient machine?  What kinds of governance systems should we put in place now to inform the world we want in 2048?

What kinds of questions would you like answered by the esteemed panel?  I’d welcome your input.

3 Comments | In: Artificial Intelligence, Convergence08 | | #

Michael Sean Wright of Nice Fish Films recorded a podcast with me today. Billed as “a discussion with really big thinkers”, we talked about The Singularity Summit and some of my favorite emerging technologies. You can hear the podcast below.

No Comments | In: Accelerating Technologies, Artificial Intelligence, Brain Machine Interface, Futurism, Intelligent Agents, Robotics, SciVestor, Semantic Web, Singularity Summit, Siri, Twine, Twitter | | #

I’m sitting back stage today at The Singularity Summit, enjoying the presentations and doing my best to stay out of the way. My chief responsibility (self assigned) is to tweet and twine the event has it happens. I’ve not used these two tools in conjunction before, but I am finding that they have an amazing synergy for recording both the fleeting zeitgeist (al a Twitter) and the enduring data (Twine).

Both are social tools. Twitter enables a group to socially instant-message and share their thoughts and perceptions of the moment. In the case of an assembled group of twitterers (tweeps? tweeters?) attending a conference, the medium becomes a method for creating a “back-channel” of conversation that floats through the aether parallel to the one-way message of the speaker.

Last spring at South by Southwest, the Twitter back-chanel flexed it’s muscle during the keynote conversation between Mark Zuckerberg and Sarah Lacy. (See Zuckerberg Keynote Descends Into Chaos as Audience Takes Over)

Tweets at The Singularity Summit have been less inflamatory (for the most part).  We’ve adopted a hashtag #SS08 which allows people to easily find Summit comments.  You can see the most recent tweets here.  We used the same hashtag yesterday at the Emerging Tech workshop, and several of the panel moderators monitored the twitter feed during their panel to incorporate feedback.

The second tool that we are using at the Summit is Twine.  (Twine is a financial sponsor of the event).  Twine is a bookmarking tool + discussion forum augmented with semantic intelligence.  As presenters discuss topics on stage, I can find a representation online and “Add To Twine”.  (Twine requires a free subscription, you can see the Summit twine here.) Once I submit content to Twine, the service pulls keywords, summary data, and relevant context from the posting and creates a relationship model that links postings to other relevant content. Twine, like Twitter, is a collaborative tool.  Anyone who subscribes to my Singularity Summit twine can add their own content which will semantically get mixed into all other contributions.

What I am finding most fascinating today (aside from the speakers) is the interplay between these two tools.  A speaker’s comments will trigger a posting to Twine which in turn causes someone else to post an item to Twitter.  Conversely, Some feedback on Twitter will trigger a post on Twine.  It’s possible that we can see a recursive feedback loop between these tools from both the speakers and the audience that will last far beyond the speaker’s 15 minutes of fame on the stage.  It would be a great benefit to Twine to integrate a Twitter feed so that semantic relationships within Twine could reference tweets and vice versa.  I’m optimistic that these two tools will work together to create a very powerful offering for managing the short term and longer term wisdom of the crowd.

No Comments | In: Singularity Summit, Twine, Twitter, Uncategorized | | #

Still considering attending the Singularity Summit this weekend?  We’ve got fewer than 50 seats remaining for the main event on Saturday, and the Friday emerging technology workshop is over subscribed.  Here is a teaser of what the day will be about. Hope you can join us!

No Comments | In: Accelerating Technologies, Artificial Intelligence, Disruption, Futurism, Nanotechnology, Robotics, Singularity Summit, Uncertainty | | #

January 1st, 2008 was the first day for SciVestor, my research and consulting firm focused on understanding emerging technologies that might change the world. We’ve accomplished a lot in the last 9 months, but I am most excited about our first upcoming event.

On Friday, October 24th, SciVestor and The Singularity Institute present the Emerging Technologies Workshop. This event is sold out, and is being held at The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, CA. The day’s agenda follows:

Schedule

8:30am Doors open
9:00am Registration – coffee and breakfast bar available
9:30am Opening Keynote – Jonas Lamis, SciVestor
10:00am Semantic Web panel + Q&A
11:00am Break
11:15am Introducing CLIMOS
11:40am Introducing m2mi
12:00pm Lunch (offsite)
1:15pm Nanotechnology Panel + Q&A
2:15pm Break
2:30pm Introducing Piryx
2:50pm Robotics panel + Q&A
3:50pm Closing Keynote – Jamais Cascio, IFTF

Event concludes at 4:30pm.

Speakers

Keynotes

Jonas Lamis Exec Director SciVestor
Jamias Cascio Analyst Institute for the Future

Semantic Web Panel

Josh Dilworth Manager Porter Novelli
Chris Morrison Editor Venturebeat
Thomas Dietterich Professor University of Oregon
Dag Kittlaus CEO stealth-company.com

Nanotechnology Panel

Andrew Braswell Director of Research iNano Capital
Christine Peterson President Foresight Institute Nano panelist
Jamais Cascio Director Center for Responsible Nanotechnology
Douglas Jamison President Harris & Harris Group
Christopher Anazalone President & CEO Arrowhead Research Corp

Robotics Panel

Jonas Lamis Exec Director SciVestor
Dan Kara CEO Robotics Trends
Bruce Hall President Velodyne LIDAR
Chetan Kapoor CEO AgilePlanet
Trevor Blackwell CEO Anybots

Company Presentations

Dan Whaley CEO Climos
Geoff Brown CEO m2mi
Tom Serres CEO Piryx

I hope you are planning to attend.  If you’d like to get into this event but don’t have a ticket, email me at jlamis@scivestor.com to see what we can do.

No Comments | In: Nanotechnology, Robotics, SciVestor, Semantic Web, Singularity Summit | | #

Intel CTO and Ray Kurzweil Among Visionaries Headlining Singularity Summit 2008: Opportunity, Risk, Leadership

www.singularitysummit.com
Singularity Summit 2008: Opportunity, Risk, Leadership takes place October 25 at the intimate Montgomery Theater in San Jose, CA, the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence announced today. Now in its third year, the Singularity Summit gathers the smartest people around to explore the biggest idea of our time: the Singularity.

Keynotes will include Ray Kurzweil, updating his predictions in The Singularity is Near, and Intel CTO Justin Rattner, who will examine the Singularity’s plausibility. At the Intel Developer Forum on August 21, 2008, he explained why he thinks the gap between humans and machines will close by 2050. “Rather than look back, we’re going to look forward 40 years,” said Rattner. “It’s in that future where many people think that machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence.”
“The acceleration of technological progress has been the central feature of this century,” said computer scientist Dr. Vernor Vinge in a seminal paper in 1993. “We are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. The precise cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence.”

Singularity Summit 2008 will feature an impressive lineup:

* Dr. Ruzena Bajcsy, pioneering AI and robotics researcher
* Dr. Eric Baum, AI researcher, author of What is Thought?
* Marshall Brain, founder of HowStuffWorks.com, author of Robotic Nation
* Dr. Cynthia Breazeal, robotics professor at MIT, creator of Kismet
* Dr. Peter Diamandis, chair and CEO of X PRIZE Foundation
* Esther Dyson, entrepreneur, investor, philanthropist
* Dr. Pete Estep, chair and CSO of Innerspace Foundation
* Dr. Neil Gershenfeld, director of MIT Center for Bits and Atoms, author of Fab
* Dr. Ben Goertzel, CEO of Novamente, director of research at SIAI
* John Horgan, science journalist, author of The Undiscovered Mind
* Ray Kurzweil, CEO of Kurzweil Technologies, author of The Singularity is Near
* Dr. James Miller, author of forthcoming book on Singularity economics
* Dr. Marvin Minsky, one of AI’s founding fathers, author of The Emotion Machine
* Dr. Dharmendra Modha, cognitive computing lead at IBM Almaden Research Center
* Bob Pisani, news correspondent for financial news network CNBC
* Justin Rattner, VP and CTO of Intel Corporation
* Nova Spivack, CEO of Radar Networks, creator of Twine semantic-web application
* Peter Thiel, president of Clarium, managing partner of Founders Fund
* Dr. Vernor Vinge, author of original paper on the technological Singularity
* Eliezer Yudkowsky, research fellow at SIAI, author of Creating Friendly AI
* Glenn Zorpette, executive editor of IEEE Spectrum

Registration details are available at http://www.singularitysummit.com/registration/.

About the Singularity Summit
Each year, the Singularity Summit attracts a unique audience to the Bay Area, with visionaries from business, science, technology, philanthropy, the arts, and more. Participants learn where humanity is headed, meet the people leading the way, and leave inspired to create a better world. “The Singularity Summit is the premier conference on the Singularity,” Kurzweil said. “As we get closer to the Singularity, each year’s conference is better than the last.”

The Summit was founded in 2006 by long-term philanthropy executive Tyler Emerson, inventor Ray Kurzweil, and investor Peter Thiel. Its purpose is to bring together and build a visionary community to further dialogue and action on complex, long-term issues that may transform the world. Its host organization is Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization studying the benefits and risks of advanced artificial intelligence systems.

Singularity Summit 2008 partners include Clarium Capital, Cartmell Holdings, Twine, Powerset, United Therapeutics, KurzweilAI.net, IEEE Spectrum, DFJ, X PRIZE Foundation, Long Now Foundation, Foresight Nanotech Institute, Novamente, SciVestor, Robotics Trends, and MINE.

No Comments | In: Singularity Summit | | #

Press release from Lamar University

Technology innovation in the coming decade will be unlike anything the world has seen, and corporations, small businesses and individuals will have to paddle hard to catch this wave — or they might just be ripped asunder. So says Jonas Lamis, executive director of SciVestor (www.scivestor.com ), a research and advisory firm focused on understanding how future technologies will disrupt the business, economic and social frameworks of society.

Lamis will speak as a part of the IES Entrepreneurship Lecture series at 11 a.m. Thursday, Oct. 2, in the Landes Auditorium of the Galloway Business Building.

At the lecture, Lamis will cover understanding the law of accelerating returns; how semantic technologies and Artificial Intelligence will change the future of the Web; Green autonomy – how robotics and AI are redesigning the automobile and changing the climate-crisis debate; the emerging science of longevity medicine and what it might mean to people; and a framework for thinking about the potential value of new concepts and companies.

Lamis is also the director of partnerships at the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (www.singinst.org), a consortium focused on developing a framework for safe advanced artificial intelligence, primarily through research and software development. He manages partnerships between the business and investment communities, and SIAI.

Lamis is an active contributor on topics of futurism and business at several blogs, including Singularity University (www.singularityu.org), Robot Central (robotcentral.com) and SIAI Blog (www.singinst.org/blog/).

Lamis also is the founder and editor of Architecture & Governance magazine, a publication focused on helping large IT organizations plan and manage major transformation initiatives. The quarterly magazine is circulated to approximately 15,000 key IT decision-makers.

In the last decade, Lamis has held executive and managerial roles in several venture-backed software companies.  Prior to founding SciVestor, he was the vice president of alliances and vice president of corporate marketing at Troux Technologies. He holds a master of business administration from the University of Texas, a master of science from Georgia Institute of Technology and a bachelor of science in industrial engineering from Purdue University.

Lamar’s Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies, headed by Russ Waddill, entrepreneur-in-residence of the College for Business, stimulates economic development and diversification in Southeast Texas by addressing the needs of current entrepreneurs and small businesses while simultaneously enhancing the education of tomorrow’s entrepreneurs. Since its founding in 2001, the institute has engaged in research to benefit the region, working closely with local chambers of commerce, economic development agencies and city and county leaders.

Within the College of Business, students can major in entrepreneurship receiving a bachelor in business administration — general business entrepreneurship. New curriculum has also led to the creation of a minor in entrepreneurship for non-business majors, which is open to all disciplines on campus. Courses offered to the public to assist in developing business ideas, networking and finding venture capital help put wings to inspiration for students, entrepreneurs and small businesses alike.

The Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies presents lectures twice each year that adhere to the institution’s mission statement: “to stimulate economic development and diversification in Southeast Texas by addressing the needs of current entrepreneurs and small businesses, while simultaneously enhancing the education of tomorrow’s entrepreneurs.”

No Comments | In: Anti-Aging, Artificial Intelligence, Events, Futurism, Robotics, Semantic Web | | #

Several of my colleagues from the Singularity Institute (Bruce Klein and Ben Goertzel) are organizing a conference in March of 2008 to share and coordinate efforts across researchers in the area of AGI.

The event is scheduled for March 1-3 in Memphis, TN at the University of Memphis. Topics for the event include:

• Foundations and Theory of AGI
• The Role of Embodiment in AGI
• Key Enabling Applications for AGI
• Management of Complex Goal Structures
• Lifelong and Multi-Strategy Learning
• Case-by-case Problem-Solving
• AGI-based Natural Language Processing
• Connecting Sensorimotor and Concept-level Cognition
• Coherence of Integrative/Hybrid AGI Systems
• Evaluation and Comparison of AGI Projects

The submission deadline for papers passed today. For more information, see the event website at: http://www.agi-08.org/

1 Comment | In: AGI 08 | | #

I’m blogging Gartner Symposium down in Orlando this week.  My favorite session so far is: Generation Virtual: How a 40th-Level Half-Elf From Secaucus, New Jersey Will Change Your Business, by Gartner Analyst Adam Sarner.

I’ve been attending Gartner Symposium for the last 5 years (as part of my day job at an enterprise software company), but have only recently seen any recognition from Gartner that there is a relationship between their heavily IT crowd and the emergence of transformative technologies like virtual worlds and AI.

Of course, they cast this presentation in the “mavericks” track so as not to scare the assembled techies too much, but the very fact that Gartner is investing research dollars into this space is a bell-weather in my opinion.

Adam’s predictions:

• All you need is love: By 2015, 2% of people in the U.S. will be married to people they will never meet in person.

• A convenient truth: By 2015, time spent online will compete with the real world becoming the most “green” activity, reducing the average person’s overall carbon footprint by more than 50%.

• The dot-com bomb: Sales and marketing of products and services to virtual personas will “explode,” overtaking B2C spending by 2020.

• The day the earth stood still: By 2020, more than 70% of R&D investment in personal robotics will shift to virtual personal assistants.

• Mayor McBlank: A city will elect a virtual anonymous persona for mayor by 2020.

One of Sarner’s more powerful memes was the relationship between Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and the emergence of Virtual worlds and AIs. Sarner believes that the virtual world is providing the “self-actualization” that Maslow forecast, but few have been able to achieve in Meatspace.

The latter half of his presentation focused on the emergence of personal AIs – what he called “persona bots”. His take:

In 2017, the persona bot will be mass adopted (more than 20 million active persona bot users in the U.S. alone; more than 10 million in the rest of the world). The drivers for this mass adoption are primarily the persona bot’s time shifting/time saving ability, and ability and authority to carry out tasks on the user’s behalf. The persona bot’s strength will be its ability to be at many virtual places at once, seeking vast amounts of territory, while filtering back and reporting on relevant information.

 

Just as the customer will have the persona bot as a “killer application,” companies will have their own automated bot for critical relationship handling, such as sales, customer service and marketing. By 2010, more than 15% of B2C Fortune 1000 companies with a Web site will use a chat bot for online customer service. Top drivers, such as 24/7 presence and the ability to communicate domain expertise, will help customers navigate their way toward a purchase. A practice already used is text-based hybrid bots with the ability to start an automated conversation with a customer, then alert a live representative to take over the avatar once a lead is qualified. Eventually, companies will need to develop an interaction process around a fully automated persona bot gathering information from a fully automated company bot.

Sarner’s recommendations to the assembled IT intelligentsia:

• Companies should organize and target products and services online based on mankind’s journey toward self-actualization.
• Sell to the persona, not the person. A persona will show you how it wants to be treated.
• Create virtual environments as a way to orchestrate customer exploration toward purchases.
• Shift from collecting demographic data to psychographic data for understanding online persona behavior and its interaction with others.
• Shift Investment from known customers to unknown ones. Focus on the influencers within the meritocracy.
• Develop and retain or outsource new skills to attract, connect, contribute and gain insight from personas and virtual environments.
• Begin to develop strategy, process and technology around relationships with persona bots as a tool for mutual exploration.

I’m glad to see that Gartner is getting on board. Their perspective will help drive attention and investment to the area.

1 Comment | In: Artificial Intelligence, Events, Futurism | | #

There is a big change at this year’s Singularity Summit as opposed to the inaugural event last year at Stanford. Besides charging $50 to get in, the event has stretched to two full days, from one jam-packed day last year. The addition of that second day has brought about a profound shift in the agenda – the inclusion of speakers from many corporations pursing Singularity enabling technologies.

At last year’s event, the theorist presentations outnumbered the corporations’ 10-4. And the 4 were Ray Kurzweil, K. Eric Drexler (father of nanotech), Steve Jurvetson (VC), and Peter Thiel (SIAI underwriter).

This time around, the ratio has shifted to 50% of the speakers. Representing or talking about their companies on stage this year are:

· Sam Adams (IBM Distinguished Engineer)

· Rodney Brooks (iRobot)

· Neil Jacobstein (CEO, Teknowledge)

· Steve Jurvetson (Partner at DFJ)

· Peter Norvig (Director of Research, Google)

· Stephen Omohundro (Founder, Self-Aware Systems)

· Barney Pell (CEO, Powerset)

· Peter Thiel (Clarium Capital)

· Peter Voss (CEO, Adaptive AI)

There was even a “special” post-lunch presentation by Artificial Development, Inc. one of the show’s sponsors. The event also has to be more transparent regarding why these corporations have speaking slots. Powerset, for example, is funded by Peter Thiel.

I think this is an interesting shift, but I am not sure that the majority of the audience is along for the ride. I think this event is at a cross-roads this year. It will either evolve into a business-centric confab with big-thinker keynotes (which I think will happen) or it will morph into a think-fest retreat – a mini TED. Either way, I’m looking forward to seeing the evolution.

2 Comments | In: Business, Singularity Summit | | #