The Lamisphere

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.

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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.”

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I was sitting a home watching TV the other evening when a commercial came on the screen that blew me way.  It was made to look like archival footage of an old gas station being built, circa early 20th century. Snow-capped mountains loom in the distance indicating the creation of an American outpost where the prairie meets the Rockies.  As the time-lapse images progressed over the next minute, I saw the station’s comings and goings.  Kids growing up and heading off by Greyhound.  Cars, pulling in and out of the station getting fancier and larger. A driving piano score creates a tension as the images flashing on the screen go from black and white to Technicolor. The station itself is demolished and rebuilt at least 4 times in those 60 seconds, each bringing us closer to a picture of the 21st century oil economy.

And then the most unexpected thing happens.  The station withers into oblivion, the fields reclaim the asphalt and only the mountains remain.   The punch line:  The new Chevy Volt appears.

In 2010, General Motors plans to launch the Chevy Volt, a “plug-in” electric / gas hybrid that will travel 40 miles without any gas at all.  If battery technology grows on an exponential path (like Moore’s Law is driving the semiconductor industry), by the middle of the next decade, we will see vehicles that can travel hundreds of miles on an overnight charge from your garage.  By the end of the decade ahead, we are legitimately looking at the end of the gas station, as we know it.

So what does this have to do with strategic IT planning?

For the last thirty years, IT strategists and enterprise architects have held the primary roles in the enterprise for understanding technology change.  Because of the nature of the digitization of “Information” and the progress of “Technology” it was frequently enough to be an expert on processes within the four walls of the data center.  But as advancing technologies spill beyond the traditional bounds of the IT department, a new set of skills and a more savvy approach to the politics of the enterprise are necessary for those who wish to continue to wear the strategy badge.  Based on the results of the Architecture & Governance Magazine 2008 readers survey (of which I am the editor), IT departments appear to acknowledge the need to be up to the task.

The most startling result from our reader survey was the increase in C-level involvement in supporting enterprise scale transformation initiatives.  In fact, 56% of those surveyed indicated their CEO, CFO, CIO or VP was responsible for driving large-scale change.  This is up over 500% from our 2007 survey.  Across the board in the survey, as well in side bar conversations, executives are taking a much stronger interest in the sponsorship, capabilities and performance of architects and IT strategists.

Changes like the Chevy Volt occur at the intersection of corporate strategy and technology advancement and this commercial is a harbinger of coming waves of technology progress that are going to turn business models, enterprises, perhaps even whole segments of the economy on their heads.   The energy sector is already headed over the precipice.  Just behind it is everything from medical to mining to manufacturing.

As a strategist of your enterprise, the time is here to look beyond the cubicle wall, past the blinking lights of the datacenter, and raise your eyes to the snow capped mountains beyond.  There’s a change coming.

You can view the Chevy Volt commercial here.

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As part of my work with Architecture & Governance Magazine, I had the opportunity to review a new book: Blown to Bits.  The following conversation will appear in the October issue of A&G.

A&G sat down with the Ken Ledeen and Harry Lewis, the authors (along with IEEE Fellow Hal Abelson) to discuss their new book, Blown To Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness after the Digital Explosion.  (www.bitsbook.com)
The authors paint a profound picture of the risks and rewards of our techno-enhanced future.  In particular, we wanted to get their insight to the implications of every accelerating technological power on the legacy processes of the enterprise.

A&G:  Much debate has occurred around the future of IT in a distributed, open-sourced, service oriented world.  How do large IT organizations have to change in the decade ahead in order to adapt to the new structures of society, information and business.

BtB: We talk about how institutions move so much more slowly than technology.  This is clearly seen in the world of legislation, and how the legal system has a hard time keeping pace with technology change.  Global 2000 organizations, while smaller than governments, will likely continue to move the governance mechanisms forward quite slowly in the decade ahead.

Look inside traditional IT organizations.  How many COBOL and mainframe programmers do they still have?  Lots more than you might imagine.  Changes are slow to come about because the IT organization is typically focused on guarding corporate assets.

Organizations that have a lot to preserve become very conservative.  On the other hand, organizations without a legacy to manage can become extraordinarily innovative and have the opportunity to surpass the legacy institution.

On the other hand, one of the real opportunities for large IT organizations in the decade ahead is to create enormous value by mining the information that they collected as collateral aspects of their normal business. Leading organizations are finding ways to get at these vast storehouses in information and translate that information to insight and value.  This is a place where strategic IT and enterprise architecture can play a major role.

A&G: What do you see as the future of enterprise in the United States?

BtB: There is a tremendous amount of innovation taking place in entrepreneurial companies, and that is also spreading to other forums.  And it takes large organizations with their span of resources and influence to apply these innovations.   The risk among large corporations is that they miss out on embracing these new organizational paradigms.

As an example, we discuss about how Search is a new organizational paradigm in the book.  Enterprises were built with physical buildings that had rooms filled with file cabinets of information.  That metaphor carried forward into the digital age with file folders and windows and directory structures.  Search turns that paradigm on its head.  Search says you don’t categorize, you find.  While this concept came from small companies, it is now finding a foothold across the largest enterprises, which are the repositories of so much undiscovered value.

Even Google continues to morph itself.  It is no longer “just” a search company.  It is becoming a storage and retrieval company – understanding the value locked in the unstructured data of the world – for companies that don’t consider information as their main product.

A decade ago, the question was about outsourcing my hardware.  Do I want to outsource it.  Should I go to India to make that happen?  More recently, the question turned to outsourcing the application stack.  A critical question of the near future is: Do I outsource my data?  Not just the storage of it, but the management, care, feeding, and curation of it.

Are the employees at Google better in tune with the Enterprise Architecture approach of managing the inconnectivity of that data, the relationships that exist through it, and the associated value that can be captured from understanding those non obvious relationships – rather than your typical IT organization?
If I am an insurance company, I know the relationship between policy and policyholder, but I no doubt have tremendous insight buried in the related grid of information assets that I don’t have a clue about uncovering.  This offers both a tremendous challenge and opportunity for companies in the decade ahead.

A&G:  The workforce for corporate IT is aging, and it is not readily apparent that today’s “digital natives” are overly anxious to step into the shoes of their data center and application management forefathers.  What advice doyou have for corporate IT teams looking to recruit the best and the brightest?

BtB Rekindling the excitement about IT careers of any kind is a major task for the American education system.  Every computer science department is thinking about this.  The Bureau of Labor statistics point to a 50% growth in the need for IT professionals in the coming decade.  But the fact of the matter is that there is a labor shortage in every niche.

Much has been made about the cost benefits of outsourcing IT jobs - $200,000 per head in the US vs. $60,000 per head in India.  The reality is, that in the not-too-distant future, when a company has to choose from these too options, they will find that they will need to hire both –just to keep up with headcount demands.

Companies need to expand their vision of what an IT job entails and help young candidates understand that their skills related to the newest technologies can really make an impact within their organization.

A&G:  Stewardship of the bits becomes more and more an issue as value shifts from physical to digital ownership.  This shift is accelerating at many of the companies who read our magazine.  These companies used to make their money selling physical goods and running bricks and mortar establishments.  Now their primary value comes from the data they own and the insight it generates.  How should these companies protect their digital assets at the same time leverage them to generate increasing value?

These companies face two orthogonal issues:  How do I find value in the information I have collected, and how do I protect the information that I have?

Traditional digital protection is about protecting the medium – with access codes and firewalls and encryption.  But the growing issue now is about also protecting the “message”.  Who speaks for your brand?  How should you respond and nurture public commentary.  What insight should you give away, and what should you charge for?  How do you (and your customers) know that the message they are seeing is really legitimate?

A&G:  To further your point, look at the explosion of Twitter.  While there are hundreds of thousands of people “tweeting” away every day about life, products, issues etc., very few companies have embraced the medium.  Just recently, an imposter named “Janet” became the voice of ExxonMobile in the twitterverse just by registering and tweeting under the name @ExxonMobileCorp.  She answered questions on behalf of the company for several days before she was exposed.  And even after exposure, she continued to tweet under Exxon’s brand.

BtB: Right, the question becomes one of information security – not just security of the medium.  It is one of the key challenges facing IT today.

About the authors:

Ken Ledeen is Chairman and CEO of Nevo Technologies and has served on the boards of numerous technology companies.  Harry Lewis, former Dean of Harvard College, is Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard.  Together with Hal Abelson the teach Quantative Reasoning 48, an innovative Harvard course on information for non-technical, non-mathematically oriented students.

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SciVestor sat down with Dewey Gaedcke, Founder and CEO of Minggl.com.  He discusses the future of the social grid, how Moore’s Law is powering Web 2.0, and why companies and investors should care about Minggl.

No Comments | In: Artificial Intelligence, SciVestor, Semantic Web, Video | | #

I’m happy to present the new home of SciVestor videos: SciVestor Insight from Blip TV.  With the video player below, you can view all of our published videos.  Today, we uploaded a great interview with Colin Angle, co-founder and CEO of iRobot Corporation.  Enjoy!

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SciVestor sat down with Doug Lenat, AI pioneer, founder and CEO of Cycorp. He discusses how Cycorp might change the world in the next 10 years, why Moore’s Law is important, and why businesses should be interested in AI.  View the video here: http://scivestor.blip.tv/#926947

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Recently, SciVestor was quoted in a piece on the emergence of Semantic Web technologies in InfoWorld.

With the Semantic Web’s ability to hone in on just the information a user needs, companies based on a Web search advertising model such as Google may have to reconsider their plans, said analyst Jonas Lamis, executive director of SciVestor.

“They may need to rethink their business model because if I have an agent that acts on my behalf and finds things that are interesting for me, it’s not necessarily going to be reading Google ads to do that,” Lamis said.

You can read the full piece here: http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/01/15/sparql-semantic-web_1.html

 

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Singularity University has been a big fan of “Living in the Simulation” fiction over the years. The original Matrix makes our Top 10 movies list - while the sequels disappointed. Of course, a substantial amount of discourse around this concept has made it’s way into the scientific community - notably in discussions of Existential Risk. Now, from our friends at Massey University in Auckland, comes a study of observable evidence to evaluate if, in fact, we are in The Matrix…

This paper explores the idea that the universe is a virtual reality created by information processing, and relates this strange idea to the findings of modern physics about the physical world. The virtual reality concept is familiar to us from online worlds, but our world as a virtual reality is usually a subject for science fiction rather than science. Yet logically the world could be an information simulation running on a multi-dimensional space-time screen. Indeed, if the essence of the universe is information, matter, charge, energy and movement could be aspects of information, and the many conservation laws could be a single law of information conservation.
If the universe were a virtual reality, its creation at the big bang would no longer be paradoxical, as every virtual system must be booted up. It is suggested that whether the world is an objective reality or a virtual reality is a matter for science to resolve. Modern information science can suggest how core physical properties like space, time, light, matter and movement could derive from information processing. Such an approach could reconcile relativity and quantum theories, with the former being how information processing creates space-time, and the latter how it creates energy and matter.

Read the full paper here.

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By James Flanagan
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Monday, December 24, 2007

Nanotechnology companies, nurtured on billions of dollars in government grants and venture investments through most of this decade, are getting ready to go public.

Being near to taking such a step is another stage in the evolution of nanotechnology, the science of materials measured at billionths of a meter, or 1/500th of a human hair.

Experts note that nanotechnology-enabled products are already used in industry.

“There are 200 commercial products in cosmetics, apparel and sporting goods in which nanotechnology plays a role,” said Lynn Foster, emerging technologies director for the law firm Greenberg Traurig and author of the 2006 book “Nanotechnology: Science, Innovation and Opportunity.”

Foster cites clothing with a coating of nanoparticles — from Nano-Tex Corp. of Oakland, Calif. — that repels stains.

And increasing numbers of nanotech products are in the offing.

Mihail Roco, senior adviser for nanotechnology at the National Science Foundation and an architect of the government’s research effort, predicted in an interview on the Web site of the National Nanotechnology Initiative that by 2015, nanotechnology will play a crucial role in $1 trillion worth of products, “which would require 2 million workers.”

Companies in nanotechnology speak of adapting their research to medical innovations, in which nanoparticles would deliver medicine directly to individual cells, and to solar energy, in which nano-enabled photovoltaic coatings would capture and store the sun’s energy at a lower cost than today’s solar panels.

The NanoGram Corp. in Milpitas, Calif., is aiming some of its research efforts toward such solar ambitions.

“We have 58 of our 69 employees working in R&D in the clean technology area, including solar power,” said Kieran Drain, chief executive of NanoGram, which earns money by licensing innovations to manufacturers of optical and electronic products.

NanoGram has a venture with Nagase & Co. of Japan, a manufacturer of light-emitting diode, or LED, screens for digital devices.

“Our nanomaterials enable the screens to emit more light,” Drain said.

In its 11-year history, NanoGram has spun off or sold operations to other companies in communications and medical electronics.

In the past two years, the company has raised almost $27 million in venture capital backing and looks to go public in 2009, “when we’ll have become larger in annual revenues,” Drain said.

Another company hoping to go public is Unidym Inc., which works with clusters of carbon nanoparticles that possess extraordinary properties in tensile strength and conduction of electrical current.

Sean Olson, vice president for operations and strategy, said Unidym is working with companies that produce the touch screens for cell phone devices, automatic teller machines and airport check-in terminals.

“Our carbon nanotube technology makes the light-emitting chipsets less brittle and able to emit more light,” Olson said. “Our screens can take a pounding.”

Unidym, based in Menlo Park, Calif., is a subsidiary of the Arrowhead Research Corp., a public investment company that was founded in 2003 to back small companies engaged in nanotechnology research.

Arrowhead, based in Pasadena, Calif., is advised by half a dozen professors at the California Institute of Technology.

In March, Arrowhead helped Unidym merge with Carbon Nanotechnologies, a Houston-based firm that was founded by the late nanotechnology pioneer Richard Smalley of Rice University, who won the Nobel Prize for his work.

“Unidym and Carbon Nanotechnologies make a powerful combination for the future of the semiconductor industry,” said John Miller, vice president of business development at Arrowhead.

Miller explained that nanoparticles, working at atomic scales, can produce semiconductors at more infinitesimal levels than current electronic technology and at lower cost than today’s manufacturing plants, which typically cost $5 billion to build.

Arrowhead Research is backed by Fidelity Investments, a mutual fund company; York Capital Management, a hedge fund company; and other public shareholders.

“As a public company, we can take a somewhat longer-term perspective on earning a return on investment,” Miller said.

He gave that as a reason Arrowhead was able to combine Unidym with Carbon Technologies.

Venture fund investors in Carbon Technologies, which was founded in 2000, “needed to get their money out,” Miller said.

Arrowhead can now reap its own return when it assists Unidym in going public, possibly next year if general market conditions are favorable.

The Arrowhead example points up two factors in the recent evolution of nanotechnology.

One is the role of universities.

In disbursing $8 billion in research grants since 2001, the National Nanotechnology Initiative has worked through 60 or so universities all over the United States.

And it is still working through the universities that have been designated as Centers and Networks of Excellence, including the Center for Nanobiotechnology at Cornell University; the Center for Scalable and Integrated Nano-Manufacturing at the University of California, Los Angeles; the Institute for Nanoelectronics and Computing at Purdue University and others.

The other factor is the fickleness of financial market opinion.

At the beginning of this decade, nanotechnology was greeted with predictions of instant wonders and investment success.

But when technological developments seemed to take longer than anticipated, investor enthusiasm cooled and nanotechnology was looked on as an overhyped promise.

Now attitudes are becoming positive again, Foster, the nanotechnology author, said, and “we’ll see many firms coming to the public markets.”

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