The Singularity Summit page is now open for registration.

We invite you to join our extraordinary group of visionaries in business, science, technology, design, and the arts, as our community explores this exciting topic. Your participation offers a world of powerful ideas, a unique networking opportunity, and access to an exclusive directory of your peers.

As I write this there are 22 speakers planned(!), including Ray Kurzweil, Marvin Minsky, Vernor Vinge and many other very special presenters.

There is also a business workshop on emerging technology, and lots of really great announcements, that still need firming up before announcement.

I must say, I’m really stoked about this year’s conference. This feels like a turning point in Artificial General Intelligence research - the year we will look back on as the when the tide turned from an undercurrent to a groundswell. Between announcements by Intel , overviews in the New York Times, and new focus from the government into artificial brains and thecognitive sciences , this can no longer be considered a fringe science.

Last week Justin Ratner told the Intel Developer’s Conference that “machines could even overtake humans in their ability to reason, in the not so distant future.” And just yesterday, a press release was made regarding the Military’s stabs into cognitive science research, with artificial brains the size of a cat’s on the horizon.

This week John Tierney at the New York Times enters the fray, with an article discussing Vernor Vinge and his novel Rainbow’s end, and a shorter, follow-on blog post examining the feasiblity of his ideas (ie - the Singularity).

In Vernor Vinge’s version of Southern California in 2025, there is a school named Fairmont High with the motto, “Trying hard not to become obsolete.” It may not sound inspiring, but to the many fans of Dr. Vinge, this is a most ambitious — and perhaps unattainable — goal for any member of our species.

The article goes on to link to the IEEE’s arm chair technical review of the same novel.

For those of us familiar with the concepts, the news here is that it they are being presented to the public eye for the first time. News indeed.

And the sooner that Singularity concepts enter the public discourse, the sooner it will attract the resources to make it possible. While it is arguable that public attention may not a good thing (the more people talking about it, the more likely that nations and organizations will develop their own artificial general intelligence efforts, and the less control there will be over the consequences), given the scope of the undertaking, the attention is inevitable. Let us hope that we can avoid all the bad alternatives.

And what would happen to us if the machines rule? Well, Dr. Vinge said, it’s possible that artificial post-humans would use us the way we’ve used oxen and donkeys. But he preferred to hope they would be more like environmentalists who wanted to protect weaker species, even if it was only out of self-interest. Dr. Vinge imagined the post-humans sitting around and using their exalted powers of reasoning:

“Maybe we need the humans around, because they’re natural critters who could survive in situations where some catastrophe would cause technology to disappear. That way they’d be around to bring back the important things — namely, us.”

For more information, visit the Singularity Institute and join us in San Jose, October 23-25 for the 2008 Singularity Summit itself.

Intel isn’t the only company to have discovered the implications of artificial intelligence research. Wired blog reports:

The Pentagon’s crash program to create an artificial brain is just about up and running. And, if it all goes as planned, we could see an electronic chip that mimics the “function, size, and power consumption” of a cat’s cortex some time in the next decade.

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The Singularity ‘08 summit is well on its way, and to get ready for it, I am re-publishing selected videos from last year’s event. I hope that, if you are new to the concepts being discussed on this blog, these will entice you to join us at the event. If you are more familiar, but haven’t seen these, you should. For more videos from this conference (and others), visit the Singularity Institute.

Eliezer Yudkowsky, one of the world’s foremost researchers on AGI Friendly AI and recursive self-improvement presents three different schools of thought on the Singularity. Eliezer has created the Friendly AI approach to AGI, which emphasizes the importance of the structure of an ethical optimization process and its supergoal, in contrast to the common trend of seeking the right fixed enumeration of ethical rules a moral agent should follow. At the 2007 Singularity Summit, he introduced three schools of thought currently associated with the word “Singularity,” their core arguments and bolder conjectures, while noting where they support or contradict each other.

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Last week,at the Intel developer forum, Justin Rattner did everything but speak the S-word. From the intel press release:

Justin Rattner, during his keynote today at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, predicted big changes are ahead in social interactions, robotics and improvements in computer’s ability to sense the real world. He said Intel’s research labs are already looking at human-machine interfaces and examining future implications to computing with some promising changes coming much sooner than expected.

“The industry has taken much greater strides than anyone ever imagined 40 years ago,” Rattner said. “There is speculation that we may be approaching an inflection point where the rate of technology advancements is accelerating at an exponential rate, and machines could even overtake humans in their ability to reason, in the not so distant future.”

So, there you have it - depending on your take of things, this is either very good news- executive level people now understand the importance of singularity research, and so the resources to get this happening will come to bear - or very bad news - executive level people now understand the importance of singularity research and so will rape and pillage their way through it as is often their wont. (I’m kidding, of course).

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