Image Caption: WIRED NextFest Banner at the Los Angeles Convention Center. The Fourth Annual WIRED NextFest in Los Angeles, California, USA this past weekend offered a glimpse of our technological future with a variety of themed pavilions exploring the future of exploration, entertainment, security, education, design, robotics, green technologies, communication, play, health, and transportation. WIRED…

The fourth annual WIRED NextFest event begins today in Los Angeles, California. Running through Sunday, the event will feature technology exhibits and demonstrations. In addition, the X Prize Foundation will announce their new space prize. Thursday is Education Day, with 4th through 12th graders and their teachers filling the LA Convention Center for an early…

Paul Saffo from Stanford University is a forecaster and essayist. He explored AGI at the Singularity Summit 2007 in the context of popularization. Even as the public begins to join the AGI discussion, pessimism is popular right now. News reporting and commentary are lurid and pessimistic. Saffo suggested that what we need are positive and…

Dr. Ben Goertzel is SIAI Director of Research and chief science officer and acting CEO of Novamente. He believes that with the right funding and capital, AGI could be developed in nine years. Novamente is approaching AGI development by focusing on virtual agents in virtual worlds like Second Life. Goertzel defined AGI as “the ability…

Neil Jacobstein, chairman and CEO of Teknowledge Corporation, spoke in the afternoon of day one of the Singularity Summit 2007. He presented information about where we stand today with AI and where we might be heading in the medium term. Specialized AI applications have existed for a number of years and often outperform humans. Jacobstein…

[Commentary] During the Singularity Summit 2007, one of the most unexpected moments came during a panel session on day one. Peter Voss and Dr. Stephen Omohundro sat down to answer questions from the audience after their own individual presentations. Voss had suggested during his talk that AGI could benefit health and longevity research. An audience…

Dr. J. Storrs Hall is an independent scientist, inventor, and author. His most recent books are Nanofutures and Beyond AI: Creating the Conscience of the Machine. Hall talked about what nanofactories could make. Hall believes that just as computers are getting ever cheaper and smarter, nanotechnology will follow the same timeline and price improvement track.…

Tihamer Toth-Fejel is a senior research engineer at General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems, member of the advisory board for the Nanoethics Group, and a chair for the Society for Manufacturing Engineers Nanomanufacturing Technical Group. Toth-Fejel stated that “if you can’t measure it, you can’t make it.” Nanotech needs to follow these guidelines: Accuracy Precision Reliability,…

Dr. Ralph Merkle is a nanotechnology expert, Alcor Director, Zyvex Principal Fellow, and Foresight Institute adviser. He talked about health, wealth, and atoms. If you shuffle around the same atoms found in coal, you could get a diamond. Arranging atoms allows for greater precision, diversity, and lower manufacturing costs. Suppose that you can build anything…

James Von Ehr II is the founder and chairman of Zyvex Corporation. He is recognized as a respected leader in the nanotech industry and has received many awards. Zyvex was created in 1997 to develop molecular technology and has now spun off into four different companies: Zyvex: Instruments, Performance Materials, Labs, and Asia. Zyvex is…

Dr. Nadrian Seeman received a B.S. in Biochemistry and a Ph.D. in Biological Crystallography. He has published over 200 papers. He presented a talk entitled “It’s more than the secret of life: Building with DNA”. Seeman lamented that he is a working scientist, and therefore his work does not progress as fast as he would…

Chris Phoenix is CRN’s Director of Research and has studied nanotechnology for more than 15 years. He has a BS in Symbolic Systems and an MS in Computer Science. The following is paraphrased from Phoenix’s lecture “A History of Nanotechnology from 1959 to 2029”. Some people like to trace the field of nanotechnology to 1959…

Jason McCoy is the Vice President of Global Seawater, Inc., a for-profit firm. They are developing a globalized system for agriculture and aquaculture in order to provide immediate and long lasting planetary ecological balance. The lecture presented today was called “Greening the Deserts of Earth”. The firm explores many biotechnology approaches to global concerns. They…

Dr. Behrooz Dehdashti has a Ph.D. in Cardiovascular Biology and is currently a senior research analyst at the University of Arizona. He is working on the development of the Syncardia Total Artificial Heart. Dehdashti said that advanced complex atherosclerotic coronary artery disease is a therapeutic challenge, poorly treated by angioplasty and bypass surgery. Many options…

Lisa Hopper is CEO and Founder of World Care, a non-profit organization. She has a BS in Radiology Administration and Physics from George Washington University. In 1997, she put all of her retirement savings into World Care and devoted herself full time to developing the organization. In reference to her work in foreign countries Hopper…

[Guest Writer: Simone Syed] Image caption: Simone Syed (and Michael Anissimov of Accelerating Future) at the Nano/Bio 2007 conference. My day: I am very excited to be attending the Nano/Bio Conference 2007 put on by World Care and CRN (Center for Responsible Nanotechnology). I was allowed to come to this conference on scholarship after Lisa…

Ray Kurzweil is an inventor and futurist, perhaps best known now for his books and lectures regarding accelerating change and the Technological Singularity. He joined the Singularity Summit 2007 via satellite. Because his work was referenced often in other speakers’ talks, he addressed some of their comments and conclusions, including a defense of double exponential…

Yudkowsky returned to the stage to discuss the challenge of Friendly AI. The problem, to Yudkowsky, is increasingly difficult because it is difficult to pick out, of all mind possibilities, the one that we would consider friendly. In some sense, we would like to develop AI that can create expert AI, and an AI-Theory AI…

James Hughes is the the executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and host of Changesurfer Radio. He discussed preparation for the future and how futurists can have an impact on public policy. Hughes listed a series of assumptions he makes about AGI and the Technological Singularity, such as AGI is likely,…

Christine Peterson is Vice President of Foresight Nanotech Institute and she talked about how we can prepare for the advent of AGI (what she called “preparing for bizarreness”), with a focus on upcoming risks. According to Peterson, risks, and their potential solutions, can be approached in a top-down monolithic way, or a bottom-up way, in…

Steve Jurvetson is a Managing Director for the venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson. He explored two possible paths to AGI, while emphasizing an evolutionary, bottom-up approach versus designing AGI directly, based on the experience of DFJ investigating and investing in nanotechnology. Evolved systems could result in robust, resilient, and adaptive technologies, such as AGI.…

Michael Lindsay from the X Prize Foundation announced the possible development of an upcoming series of education X Prizes. After a video about past and current X Prizes, Lindsay provided new details about their latest incentive competitions. Education is a challenge, especially in the United States. The public perceives the school system as broken. The…

Dr. Charles L. Harper, Jr. is Senior Vice President for the John Templeton Foundation. He provided three big questions people might want to think about regarding AGI and the Technological Singularity: Big Question #1: What do slugs know of Mozart? Big Question #2: How serious is the “dilemma of power”? Big Question #3: How important…

Peter Thiel is an investor, co-founder of PayPal before it sold to eBay, and supporter of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. He offered advice regarding investing in a world where the possibility of a Technological Singularity exists. The Singularity suggests to Thiel either profoundly positive or negative outcomes. Since it makes little sense to…

Dr. J. Storrs Hall, an independent AI researcher, inventor, and author, presented a revised version of Isaac Asimov’s Laws of Robotics. Unlike Asimov’s robots, we want our AI to be self-improving. If there are to be laws, they will need to be flexible and abstract, like a conscience. Just like technology, morality can be improved,…

Dr. Peter Norvig is Director of Research at Google. He spoke about the difficulty and inaccuracy of prediction, as well as his thoughts on how AGI will be developed. Prediction by experts has been found by some researchers to be less effective if the expert knew a lot about particular subjects or were driven by…

Peter Voss, founder and CEO of Adaptive AI, a stealth AGI company, focused on the benefits that might result from the advent of AGI. Voss is optimistic that AGI will be developed in less than 10 years, and potentially in less than 5 years. For Voss, hardware is not a problem. The pieces of the…

Dr. Stephen Omohundro, founder and president of Self-Aware Systems, spoke about self-improving systems using the science of microeconomic theory. Using space, time, matter, and free energy resources, AI, like humans, will seek self-improvement and converge on rational agents, a small area of mind space. While evolution lead to rational agents, it could only act through…

Jamais Cascio is a writer and speaker, cofounded WorldChanging.com, and has served as a futurist for several organizations. He introduced the concept of the Metaverse, as it might relate to the Technological Singularity. The Metaverse includes ideas like virtual worlds, mirror worlds, augmented reality, and lifelogging. Each one offers glimpes of how the Singularity might…

Here are two other livebloggers from the Singularity Summit 2007: Michael Anissimov at Accelerating Future David Orban

Marcus Guillen of Artificial Development (AD) announced today at the Singularity Summit 2007 the company’s first commercial product: the CCortex Spiking Neural Network Engine. A mammalian brain simulator, the technology can simulate up to 100 billion individual neurons and up to 100,000 synapses per neuron. A free version will be provided online, as well as…

Wendell Wallach is an expert in the emerging discipline of “Machine Ethics”, a topic he discussed within the context of ethics as it relates to AGI and the Technological Singularity. Wallach presented a number of difficulties that make these technologies difficult to develop, including complexity of the task, thresholds that must be surpassed first, and…

Sam Adams is a research engineer at IBM. He discussed the Joshua Blue Project that ran from 2000 through 2002. The project was intended apply lessons learned in human toddler development to AGI development. Even toddlers have the ability to accomplish many tasks that are hard problems for AGI. With this in mind, researchers attempted…

Barney Pell, founder and CEO of Powerset, a semantic search engine set to launch this month, spoke about the paths toward AGI. He emphasized that most AI research has not been devoted to general intelligence, due to a variety of reasons. What framework will be required for the development of AGI? Pell suggested that we…

Eliezer Yudkowsky, a researcher attempting to create “Friendly” AI, spoke about the three major schools of thought regarding the Technological Singularity: Accelerating Change – technology trends follow exponential growth Event Horizon – minds that are smarter than humans, including human brain enhancement, interfaces, and even AGI Intelligence Explosion – improving intelligence using technology in a…

Read Richard’s current thoughts about transhumanism and related fringe topics here. Dr. Rodney Brooks opened the Singularity Summit 2007 with a summary of concepts related to the Singularity, robotics, and artificial general intelligence. He then talked about his work at iRobot and MIT, including the success of Roomba, visual attention systems in robots like KISMET,…

The drive from Tucson, Arizona to San Francisco, CA is about 1460 kilometers (907 miles) long and takes about 14 hours. During that time, a driver makes many decisions, many of them consciously, many of them not. Operating the vehicle becomes nearly automatic after years of practice, but years of practice make traffic, construction, and…

Read Richard’s current thoughts about transhumanism and related fringe topics here. H+ members will soon be attending three upcoming conferences: We now plan to cover these events via Frontier Channel, with live, or near-live posts throughout these events! More details soon.