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.
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).
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!
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.
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
Jonas Lamis Exec Director SciVestor
Jamias Cascio Analyst Institute for the Future
Josh Dilworth Manager Porter Novelli
Chris Morrison Editor Venturebeat
Thomas Dietterich Professor University of Oregon
Dag Kittlaus CEO stealth-company.com
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
Jonas Lamis Exec Director SciVestor
Dan Kara CEO Robotics Trends
Bruce Hall President Velodyne LIDAR
Chetan Kapoor CEO AgilePlanet
Trevor Blackwell CEO Anybots
Dan Whaley CEO Climos
Geoff Brown CEO m2mi
Tom Serres CEO Piryx
Intel CTO and Ray Kurzweil Among Visionaries Headlining Singularity Summit 2008: Opportunity, Risk, Leadership
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.
Today’s keynote at the Singularity Summit was Peter Norvig, Director of Research from Google. His talk was titled The History and Future of Technological Change, and he couched his presentation as an analysis of “how to evaluate technical change”.
This is the first time I have heard Norvig speak, and I found his talk to be extremely pragmatic. His trek through the art of predicting the future, to demonstrations of narrow AI to his list of AGI prerequisites pointed toward a technologist with a perspective firmly grounded in continuous improvement, averse to making high-risk, long-shot bets. If Norvig speaks from a place of authority on Google product direction, it seems to me that we should expect continued evolutionary innovation from GOOG, but they will leave the breakthrough innovation of AGI to others. This is an important observation for the investment community that has put Google on pedestal related to the continued release of major breakthroughs.
Norvig began his talk discussing how the predictions he was used to making are about incremental advancements in technology. A 1% improvement here, a 2% improvement there. He pointed out that predictions about AGI are 100% “or greater” improvement ruminations. He pointed out the dichotomy between other prognosticators. “We will all be dead in 100 years” vs. “We will live to be 1000 years old”. “AGI can’t happen for another 100 years” vs. “within the next 10 years”.
From there, Norvig took a detour through other concepts of “Artificial General”. He postulated about “Artificial General Space Exploration”, “Artificial General Materials Science”, and “Artificial General Culture” – equating these concepts to the emergence of AGI.
Here Norvig was at his most pragmatic. He sees continuous innovation in these areas bringing about a more advanced capability, but certainly no “rapture”, no “big bang”. He commented that “the Singularity is a period, not a point”. He sees a date in the future when we look back at the progress and say – wow that was a big change.
In preparation for this presentation Norvig used Google Scholar to query papers presenting breakthroughs in AI. His keywords were “AI” and “unlike previous”. From 1968 – present, Norvig can’t tell the difference in breakthrough claims, with claims of novelty repeating in the data set. This indicates to him that we are not on the verge of discovering something major in AI.
To bring about an AGI, Norvig offered his list of prerequisites:
I think the recursive thinking nature of Norvig’s AGI underpins his continuous improvement philosophy, and also presents a very Googlian view of success. Let an algorithm loose on lots of data, and eventually it might get there.
Rodney Brooks asked Norvig a question during the Q&A session:
Brooks – Any emergent property of Google materializing within the massive systems that has been a surprise?
Norvig’s best answer was that he was surprised at how Game theoretic Google’s role in the internet is. Initially, he thought Google would be an observer of the internet – just serving up search results. Now Google is co-evolving with the web.
J. Storrs Hall is a noted scientist and author. He is chief scientist at Nanorex and has published extensively on the subject. His most recent book is titled Beyond AI: Creating the Conscience of the Machine (2007).
Hall spoke at The Singularity Summit this morning on the topic of revising Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics. As a refresher, Asimov’s laws follow:
With Asimov, the 3 laws were “hardwired into the circuitry.” He envisioned the laws being codified in the circuitry. Alas, according to Hall, the Robotic AGIs (Artificial General Intelligence) of the future will be software and wetware. And “Asimov’s robots didn’t Improve Themselves. Our AIs, we hope, Will.”
So, Hall posed the question, “how can you imagine writing a law that is to govern in an environment you can’t predict. Like Hammurabi writing laws that predict the Enron scandal.” Our new “laws” have to be much more abstract and flexible – more like a conscience. According to Hall, we’ve done this for ages – it’s called raising children.
To punctuate his perspective, Hall predicted “by 2050 – most corporations will be run by their management information systems. Their first law will be ‘make a profit’.”
Hall’s New Laws of Robotics:
Hall referenced Socrates – “there is no good but knowledge, and no evil but ignorance” as a basis for morality across cultures. The same should apply to AGI.
o Law 1a – in particular a robot shall understand mimetic evolution.
Mimetic evolution is the reflective or representative of actuality or reality of human experience (derived from Aristotle’s concept of mimesis or imitation). This is important because evolution is where morals come from.
We live in a world largely run by artificial organizations that have no conscious – Corporations and Governments. But corporations are required by law to have an “open-source motivational system” – Auditing – because Money is their Emotion. Transparency to robot motives and capabilities will be critical with an AGI.
Our economic environment is the necessary outcome of evolution. We must train our AGIs to understand and appreciate the power of economics so that they will drive toward optimal decisions.
Jamais Cascio, co-founder of WorldChanging.com just finished his talk at the Summit. Without powerpoint, Cascio told us a fascinating tale about 4 different scenarios as to how the Singularity metaverse might materialize.
He riffs on virtual worlds, mirror worlds, augmented reality, and lifelogging. The full text of his talk is available at the link below:
Open the Future: Singularity Summit Talk: Openness and the Metaverse Singularity
I’m really getting excited about the Singularity Summit, coming up on Sept 8 and 9 in San Francisco. I’ll be blogging the event.
Although we are still a few years away from mainstream understanding of the Singularity principles, it is exciting to see the wave of digerati associating themselves with the concepts.
When a high-power VC like Steve Jurvetson commits to a speaking slot, you can tell that tsunami of interest will be building behind him. Here is a link to a podcast previewing his thoughts on ZD Net:
Steve Jurvetson: AI, nanotech and the future of the human species