Singularity Summit Stanford May 2006
11:07 PM, May 16, 2006
Sean and I and Andrew Lichtman and Ying Chen attended. It began at 9 AM.
We got in the VIP entrance at Mem Aud. We sat in the front row.
Tyler Emerson arranged our VIP admission and our invitation to the reception at the Computer History Museum that night.
It was Saturday, May 13, 2006.
Seated behind us were Larry Niven (Ringworld) and Jerry Pournelle (who was very loud). John McCarthy joined them in the afternoon immed behind us.
Nils Nilssen sat a few rows back.
Q: why didn't they charge for the event? Tyler E: they wanted the imprimatur of Stanford and Stanford would not allow them to use Mem Aud and charge.
RAY KURZWEIL
How are humans different: big cerebral cortex; opposable thumb; capacity for recursion ... gen. grammar.
Not too many bytes of difference btwn us and apes (in DNA terms)
Punch card machines did the American census ... first big use of computing machinery.
Moore's Law is the FIFTH paradigm (electromech punch cards, relays, vacuum tubes, discrete transistors, ic's (fifth)) for IT.
Moore's Law : a dynamic, chaotic system (people all over world working on different pieces of this ... yet the sum of their work falls on a straight (log) line.
Just like an ideal gas like a law of thermodynamics ... brownian motion in particles yet the result is Boyle's law.
Ray said "I'm going to read from my book." He then took a camera and took a picture of the book ... it then READ the passage aloud!!! Ray said he developed it based
on his prediction of where technology would be at in 2006. He shows many log graphs from Chap 1 of Singularity Near.
Tech top-line growth is 18% compounded annually ... that is the market ... it does NOT saturate. New innovations create new markets.
(he again mentions beta cells encased in particles with 7 nano pores which block antibodies.
cerebellum is 1/2 of all neurons ... very simple design, repeated millions of times. (same as cerebral cortex). Can get great complexity from iteration of simple design.
Genome is only about 30-100 megabytes when compressed; mentions an artifcial panceas in FDA testing. (hard to model one islet (as it is to model one neuron) but easy to model the entire pancreas.)
Tech adoption is the driving force behing productivity and the entire economy.
Language translation: translating telephone: translating from English to Russian and French to English. Google guys do English to Arabic using only large databases of phrases ... no grammar.
He predicts many embedded AI's.
Genetic Algorithms (Koza): better if they alter their means of evolution. (see my big idea for 11:06 PM, May 18, 2006 under correspondence ... Evolution by Design Teams)
Ray "Down time of Internet ... zero seconds" Redundant; See NYT article by Ray and Bill Joy on "Recipe for Destruction"
DOUG HOFFSTADER:
Doug wrote an article: who will be we in 2093? Later changed date to 2493.
He organized a Spiritual Robots Symposium Arpil 1, 2000 (Spiritual was from Ray's book; Robot was from Hans Moravec book.) Symposium was unsatisfactory.
Joe Weitzenbaum spoke in Rotterdam and was cheered when he said robots could never emulate humans and no one should try.
Dough thought this was parochial. (Europeans are luddites)
Symbolic Systems urged Doug to do Symposium when he was on sabbatical in ? 2001 ... I attended that one ... Kevin Kelly, Ralph Merket, Bill Joy, Frank Drake, John Koza, John Holland.
Much better symposium..
SLIDE: Ray K/ Hans M. ..................> the HUGE IQ pathway that Ends Humanity (Hoffstader) ...> we are left in the dust by our techno progeny.
..............................> the LOW IQ End of Humanity (Bill Joy) ... we are smothered by self-reproducing technodust.
Doug critiques of Ray: Ray wants to equate Moore's Law to an ideal gas.
Doug mentions Doug Cops Emmy which writes pieces like Bach (but not as good).
Doug: IBM's Blue Gene computer will have 10**13 or 10**15 flops to simulate the folding of one protein; perhaps our memory depends on
the folding of many proteins ... he speculates.
Doug: most telling critique ... singularity is ignored by professionals (too much sci fi; too much hand waving) ... its like listening to one side of a divorce
NICK BOSTROM: The Future of Humanity: (Oxford) German guy.
He labeled catastrophes by SCOPE, INTENSITY, PROBABILITY: EXISTENTIAL RISKS
SCOPE transgenerational loss of one species / irrev. loss of biodiversity
global global warming
local car traffic recession genocide
personal loss of hair car stolen fatal crash
imperceptible endurable terminal hellish
Existential Risks: transgenerational risks of annihilation
Bangs: sudden, discrete events: meteor strike
Crunches: humanity permanently loses its ability to transform
badly programmed superintelligence:
nanotech: non-weapons accident
Nick Bostom/ Tegmark: Nature article
crunches: social collapse: technology arrest, eco destruction
shrieks: flawed superintelligence
whisper: erosion of core values: dehumanization
how much to spend on drowning birds (drowning in oily ponds):
study shows no difference in $ whether salvage is 2000 birds or 200k birds.
Conclusion: must devote considerable thought to avoiding existential risks.
RECEPTION: Picture with Ray Kurzweil and me taken by Renee Blodgett. (remind Renee that its after Alyson and Matt).
her site is downtheavenue.com (the picture is there on the left). her email is renee@blodgettcomm.com
John Smart Accelerating Studies told me Bart Kosko uses the same phrase "consciousnesson a chip"
John says Verizon will drop their price from 80/mo down to 60/mo at end of year (competition). (see my notes under Verizon ... this package is NOW offered for 60/mo).
He uses Sony VAIO laptop VGN VX17VP ... with organic polymer screen weight abt 2.5 lbs ?
He uses Verizon plug in device ... faster than DSL and ubiquitous.
He gets 7 hours to 12 hours of battery life .
He recom something from microvision.com; also, rather than thebrain.com he was attracted to (but does not use) MindManager from mindjet (see my notes)
See separate notes on Smart, John johnsmart@accelerating.org;
Miguel Aznar recommedns The Food Revolution and John Robbins (? heir of Baskin Robbins) who lives in Santa Cruz ... who wrote a lot on line
about the problems of fat in ice cream. Nice guy. Miguel is "Director of Education" at the Foresight Nanotech Institute
aznar@foresight.org www.foresight.org phone is 831 465-6513 live in Santa Cruz.
Peter Thiel: nice guy: I chat with him; they emphasize macroeconomics; he had a job on Wall Street; he knew Kevin H in grad school but did not room with him.