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The Stanford University Symbolic Systems Program and the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence announced today the Singularity Summit at Stanford, a one-day event free to the public, to be held Saturday, May 13, 2006 at Stanford Memorial Auditorium, Stanford, California. The event will bring together leading futurists and others to examine the implications of the "Singularity" -- a hypothesized creation of superintelligence as technology accelerates over the coming decades -- to address the profound implications of this radical and controversial scenario. "The Singularity will be a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its...

On Wednesday of this week, at two minutes and three seconds after 1:00 A.M. in the morning, the time and date will be: 01:02:03 04/05/06. That won't ever happen again. You may now return to your (normal ?) life.

Options for a coming singularity include self-destruction of civilization, a positive singularity, a negative singularity (machines take over), and retreat into tradition. Our urgent goal: find (and avoid) failure modes, using anticipation (thought experiments) and resiliency -- establishing robust systems that can deal with almost any problem as it arises. In order to give you pleasant dreams tonight, let me offer a few possibilities about the days that lie ahead—changes that may occur within the next twenty or so years, roughly a single human generation. Possibilities that are taken seriously by some of today's best minds. Potential transformations of human...

At the onset of the twenty-first century, humanity stands on the verge of the most transforming and the most thrilling period in its history. It will be an era in which the very nature of what it means to be human will be both enriched and challenged, as our species breaks the shackles of its genetic legacy and achieves inconceivable heights of intelligence, material progress, and longevity. For over three decades, the great inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil has been one of the most respected and provocative advocates of the role of technology in our future. In his classic...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A supermassive black hole appears to be homeless in the cosmos without a galaxy to nestle in, Hubble Space Telescope scientists reported on Wednesday. Most monster black holes lurk at the heart of massive galaxies, slurping up matter from the galactic center with a pull so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape. But a team of European astronomers reported in the journal Nature that a particular black hole some 5 billion light-years away has no evidence of a host galaxy. A light-year is about 6 trillion miles, the distance light travels in a year. The...

Just finished "Singularity." Would love to know what you eggheads out there think of it. WARNING: If you are going to post something that gives the plot away...pls warn readers first. I have no connection to the book...I would just like to see a "book review" section here.

Is Science Fiction About To Go Blind The starship Field Circus is racing through space on a seven-year journey to a brown dwarf three light-years from Earth and, if all goes well, a business meeting with an alien civilization from another universe. It’s around the year 2030, and there’s time to kill, so three crew members, Boris, Pierre and Su Ang, are sitting in the bar, a wood-paneled room modeled after a 300-year-old pub in Amsterdam. There’s a 16-page beer menu, but Boris has opted for a cocktail made of baby jellyfish. Pierre is angling for a sip when Donna...

Oh, boy. Another evangelist singing the praises of the Geek Rapture, aka the Singularity: “Some day the Big Computer in the Sky will appear and whisk us all away from this mean old carnal world to a clean, brightly-lit technoheaven, where we can all be rockets and have sex with other rockets.” Uh, okay, whatever. The Transhumanist desire to shed the dirty world of imperfect flesh for a paradise of pure gnosis would be familiar to St. Augustine; he was trapped in Faustus‘ Manichaean misasma for nine years. Now come the new Manichaeans: “To set the light-substance [mind] free from...

An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense "intuitive linear" view. So we won't experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century -- it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today's rate). The "returns," such as chip speed and cost-effectiveness, also increase exponentially. There's even exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth. Within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to The Singularity -- technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history. The implications include...

From The Low Beyond. ©1996-©2001 by Eliezer S. Yudkowsky.  All rights reserved. The address of this document is http://sysopmind.com/singularity.html. If you found it elsewhere, please visit the foregoing link for the most recent version.   Created:  11/18/1996   Updated:  05/27/2001 The short version:If computing speeds double every two years,what happens when computer-based AIs are doing the research?Computing speed doubles every two years. Computing speed doubles every two years of work. Computing speed doubles every two subjective years of work. Two years after Artificial Intelligences reach human equivalence, their speed doubles. One year later, their speed doubles again. Six months -...

US report foretells of brave new world By Nathan Cochrane July 23 2002 Next   A draft government report says we will alter human evolution within 20 years by combining what we know of nanotechnology, biotechnology, IT and cognitive sciences. The 405-page report sponsored by the US National Science Foundation and Commerce Department, Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance, calls for a broad-based research program to improve human performance leading to telepathy, machine-to-human communication, amplified personal sensory devices and enhanced intellectual capacity.People may download their consciousnesses into computers or other bodies even on the other side of the solar system, or...