Blogging today from beautiful Stanford, CA at the Singularity Summit. Ray Kurzweil kicked off the proceedings with a mind-blowing keynote summarizing the main points from The Singularity Is Near and commenting on a few more recent developments, particularly regarding pattern recognition advances in artificial intelligence.
Ray was followed by some prodding from physicist Doug Hoftstader (author of Godel, Escher and Bach) who implored the audience (and Ray in particular) for more credible arguments regarding the pending Singularity that rely more on science and less on science fiction.
Oxford's Nick Bostrom (and World Transhumasist Association leader) didn't help much by rambling while reading 50-60% of the slides he could get to in the allotted time. No doubt that Nick is a genius who has made significant contributions to the Transhuman movement; I just wish he was a more focused speaker.
A break from PowerPoint came with Cory Doctorow (one of my favorite scifi writers) who described the threat of DRM to agency (of which innovation, contribution and knowledge sharing are subsets) while effectively demonstrating his accelerating Continuous Partial Attention by collaborating with several other people in the audience (and elsewhere?) over a SubEthaEdit connection to blog at least three entries while on stage. In response to a question about vital skills for preparing for a post-Singularity world, Cory talked the ability to rapidly and accurately close the appropriate Windows on your computer screen. He quoted Bruce Sterling, "If you can describe what you do for a living, your job has already been outsourced."
Eric Drexler whipped through a brief primer or nanotechnology. It was cool to see such a legend in engineering. Too bad he left during the lunch break and was unable to join the panel discussion in the afternoon.
Max More of the Extropy Institute presented an entertaining and concise description of the Proactionary Principle for guiding wise (vs. simply "intelligent") decision processes. I have been a fan of Max's work for many years and it was delightful to have a moment to talk with him as well.
John Smart earns the slides-per-minute award for plowing through 89 slides in about 20 minutes. He did offer the slides as a free download and there is a wealth of fantastic depth to explore there.
Eliezer Yudowsky presented a fascinating tour of the Mind-In-General Design Space that transcends the "ethnic stereotypes" popularized in AI-focused scifi movies.
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