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.