Hughes, Cascio & Wallach @ Singularity Summit II

Theme: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity

http://www.singinst.org/events

When: September 8 - 9 | 9:00 AM - 6:00 PM

Where: Palace of Fine Arts Theatre | San Francisco, CA

Cost: $50 per ticket

Reward: Remarkable summit, networking, lunches, and reception

In recent years, several scientists and authors have argued that there is a significant chance that advanced artificial intelligence will be developed within a few decades. Similar claims, however, have been made over the past 50 years. What is different now? The Singularity Summit II will bring together over 20 premier thinkers from relevant disciplines to examine whether we are really nearing a turning point toward powerful intelligence.

Last year, the Singularity Summit at Stanford, the first academic symposium focused on the singularity scenario, brought together 1300 people and 10 speakers to explore the future of human and machine cognition, including Ray Kurzweil, Douglas R. Hofstadter, and Sebastian Thrun. Press coverage included the San Francisco Chronicle, ZDNET, and Business 2.0. Presentations can be viewed online or downloaded in SIAI Media.

The Singularity Summit II at the Palace of Fine Arts Theatre will be an important exploration of what may be a historical moment in time – a window of opportunity to affect how the world moves forward with a powerful new technology. You will have the chance to meet and interact with some of the most extraordinary, forward-looking people. We hope you will join us for this vital exploration of the forces shaping the future of our world.

Core Questions

We are creating an ambitious agenda around the following core questions:

  * How Far are We from Advanced Artificial Intelligence?
  * What are the Pathways to Advanced AI? What is the Fastest Path?
  * What are the Major Challenges?
  * What Will Powerful Intelligence Enable?
  * What Risks Will We Face?
  * What are the Implications for Society, Ethics, Business, and Politics?
  * What Do We Ultimately Want?
  * What Needs to Happen? What Can We Do?

Dr. Rodney Brooks is Director (until June 30, 2007) of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and is the Panasonic Professor of Robotics at MIT. He is also CTO of iRobot Corp (Nasdaq: IRBT). He received degrees in pure mathematics from the Flinders University of South Australia and the Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1981. He held research positions at Carnegie Mellon University and MIT, and a faculty position at Stanford before joining the faculty of MIT in 1984.  He has published papers and books in model-based computer vision, path planning, uncertainty analysis, robot assembly, active vision, autonomous robots, micro-robots, micro-actuators, planetary exploration, representation, artificial life, humanoid robots, and compiler design. Dr. Brooks is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Founding Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and a Corresponding Member of the Australian Academy of Science, and a Foreign Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering.

Jamais Cascio writes about the intersection of emerging technologies and cultural transformation, and specializes in the design and creation of plausible scenarios of the future. His work focuses on the importance of long-term, systemic thinking, particularly regarding the environment and technological development. A recurring theme in his writing is the importance of openness, transparency, and flexibility as a toolkit for social and technological progress. In 2003, he co-founded WorldChanging.com, the award-winning website dedicated to finding and calling attention to models, tools and ideas for building a “bright green” future. In his time at WorldChanging, Cascio covered topics including urban design, climate science, renewable energy, open source models, emerging technologies, social networks, “leapfrog” global development, and much more. In March 2006, he started Open the Future as his online home. In 2004, Cascio was selected as a founding Fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. Cascio has worked in the field of scenario development for over a decade. After several years as technology specialist at Global Business Network, he went on to craft a wide array of scenarios on topics including energy, nuclear proliferation, and sustainable development. He is currently an affiliate at the Institute for the Future, and serves as the Global Futures Strategist for the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology.

Dr. Ben Goertzel is SIAI Director of Research, responsible for overseeing the direction of the Institute’s research division. He has over 70 publications, concentrating on cognitive science and AI, including Chaotic Logic, Creating Internet Intelligence, Artificial General Intelligence (edited with Cassio Pennachin), and Hidden Pattern. He is chief science officer and acting CEO of Novamente, a software company aimed at creating applications in the area of natural language question-answering. He also oversees Biomind, an AI and bioinformatics firm that licenses software for bioinformatics data analysis to the NIH’s National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases and CDC. Previously, he was founder and CTO of Webmind, a 120+ employee thinking-machine company. He has a Ph.D. in mathematics from Temple University, and has held several university positions in mathematics, computer science, and psychology, in the US, New Zealand, and Australia.

Dr. John S. Hall is an independent scientist and author. His research focus is in AI and machine ethics. His latest book, in press (Prometheus, 2007), is Beyond AI: Creating the Conscience of the Machine. His previous book, Nanofuture: What’s Next for Nanotechnology (Prometheus, 2005), won the Foresight Institute’s Communications Prize and Drew University’s Bela Kornitzer Prize. Previously, Hall was the founding chief scientist of Nanorex Inc., a software company developing computational modeling tools for the design and analysis of productive nanosystems. His research background includes microprocessor design, compilers, massively parallel processor design, CAD software, and automated multi-level design. His inventions include swarm robotic systems, self-bootstrapping automated manufacturing systems, adiabatic logic, and agoric operating systems.

Dr. Charles L. Harper, Jr. is Senior Vice President of the John Templeton Foundation. His primary responsibilities are in the areas of strategic planning, program design and development, vision casting, philanthropic networks development, and talent scouting. He has worked to transform philanthropy by developing innovative entrepreneurial practices in grant making, and has created more than $200 million in grant-based programs ranging widely from the study of forgiveness and reconciliation and enterprise-based solutions for poverty, to projects on foundational questions in physics and cosmology, including topics in chemistry, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, medicine, and the philosophy of science. He is the founding Chairman of Geneva Global, Inc., an innovative new philanthropic organization making grants worldwide within the developing world. Initially trained in engineering at Princeton (B.S.E. 1980), he obtained his D.Phil. in planetary science from the University of Oxford for a thesis on the nature of time in cosmology (1988). He also holds the Diploma in Theology from Oxford (1988) and a Certificate of Special Studies in Management and Administration from Harvard (1997). In his science career, he was a National Research Council Fellow at the NASA Johnson Space Center (1988-91) and a research scientist in the Harvard Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and at the Harvard College Observatory (1991-95). His most recent edited publication is Spiritual Information: 100 Perspectives on Science and Religion (Templeton Foundation Press, 2005), to which a sequel consisting of the “10 best” essays is planned. Other scientific publications include more than 50 research articles in scientific journals, including Nature, Science, and the Astrophysical Journal.

Dr. James “J.” Hughes serves as the executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, where he produces the weekly syndicated public affairs talk show Changesurfer Radio. Dr. Hughes is a sociologist who teaches Health Policy at Trinity College in Hartford Connecticut. He is the author of Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future, and is working on a second book on neurotechnology, tentatively titled Cyborg Buddha: Using Neurotechnologies to Enhance Virtue. He is editor of the Journal of Evolution and Technology, a Fellow of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities and the Working Group on Ethics and Technology at Yale University. Dr. Hughes speaks on medical ethics, health care policy, and future studies worldwide, and often appears on radio and television. He lives in rural eastern Connecticut with his wife, the artist Monica Bock, and their two children.

Neil Jacobstein is chairman and CEO of Teknowledge Corporation, a 25-year old software company. He has served as a technical consultant on software research and development projects for NSF, DARPA, NASA, NIH, EPA, DOE, the U.S. Army and Air Force, GM, Ford, Boeing, Applied Materials, and other agencies. In 1999, he co-chaired the American Association for Artificial Intelligence’s 16th Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference, and chaired the 17th IAAI Conference in 2005. In 1999, he was selected as an Aspen Institute Henry Crown Fellow. Since 1992, he has served as chairman of the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing, a not-for-profit research group focused on the long-term feasibility, embedded safeguards, and applications of molecular manufacturing. He was the leading co-author of the Foresight Guidelines for Responsible Nanotechnology Development. In 2006, he became a senior research fellow in the Digital Visions Program at Stanford University.

Dr. Peter Norvig is the Director of Research at Google Inc, where he has been since 2001. From 2002-2005 he was Director of Search Quality, which means he was the manager of record responsible for answering more queries than anyone else in the history of the world. He is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and the Association for Computing Machinery and co-author of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, the leading textbook in the field (with 94% market share). Previously he was the head of the Computational Sciences Division at NASA Ames Research Center, making him NASA’s senior computer scientist. He received the NASA Exceptional Achievement Award in 2001. He has served as an assistant professor at the University of Southern California and a research faculty member at the University of California at Berkeley Computer Science Department, from which he received a Ph.D. in 1986 and the distinguished alumni award in 2006. He has over fifty publications in Computer Science, concentrating on Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing and Software Engineering, including the books Paradigms of AI Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp, Verbmobil: A Translation System for Face-to-Face Dialog, and Intelligent Help Systems for UNIX. He is also the author of the Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation and the world’s longest palindromic sentence.

Dr. Stephen Omohundro has had a wide-ranging career as a scientist, university professor, author, software architect, and entrepreneur. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford with Honors and Distinction in Physics and with Distinction in Mathematics. He received a Ph.D. in Physics from UC Berkeley, and published Geometric Perturbation Theory in Physics based on his thesis. At Thinking Machines Corporation, he co-developed Star Lisp, the programming language for the massively parallel Connection Machine. He was a computer science professor at the University of Illinois at Champaign/Urbana where he co-founded the Center for Complex Systems Research. He wrote the three-dimensional graphics portion of Wolfram Research’s Mathematica program as one of the original seven developers. At the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, he led an international team in developing the object-oriented programming language Sather. He also developed a variety of novel neural network techniques and machine learning algorithms and built systems which learned to read lips, control robots, and learn grammars. At the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, he worked on a variety of applications of AI and co-authored a patent on the PicHunter image database retrieval system. He founded Olo Software in Palo Alto to provide technology and business consulting to a variety of startups and research labs, including InterTrust Technologies, Xerox PARC, Fuji-Xerox PAL, Ask Jeeves Inc., VideoScribe, LinuxMatix, Video Memoirs, and Molecular Objects. He is the founder and president of Self-Aware Systems, founded to develop a new kind of software that programs itself.

Dr. Barney Pell is founder and CEO of Powerset, a stealth-stage startup developing advanced AI technologies to deliver breakthroughs in search and navigation. He is owner of Decision Theory, a research and consulting company specializing in product strategy and business development for applications of advanced computer science, including search, information management, natural language processing, and optimization. Prior to Powerset, Pell was an entrepreneur in residence at Mayfield, a VC firm in Silicon Valley. In this role, he generated and helped evaluate potential investments in early to mid-stage companies. Prior to joining Mayfield, he was technical area manager for the 80-person collaborative and assistant systems (CAS) area within the Computational Sciences Division at NASA Ames Research Center. A recognized expert on autonomous agents and human/agent interaction, he has published over 30 technical papers on topics related to information retrieval, knowledge management, machine learning, AI, and scheduling systems.

Christine Peterson is co-founder and vice president of public policy of the Foresight Nanotech Institute, the leading nanotechnology public interest group. She writes, lectures and briefs the media on nanotechnology. She directs the Foresight Conferences on Molecular Nanotechnology and organizes the Foresight Institute Feynman Prizes. She also works with Freedom Technology Ventures, and serves on the advisory board of Alameda Capital, the International Council on Nanotechnology, California’s Blue Ribbon Task Force on Nanotechnology, and the editorial advisory board of NASA’s Nanotech Briefs. In 1992, with K. Eric Drexler and Gayle Pergamit, she wrote Unbounding the Future: The Nanotechnology Revolution, and coauthored Leaping the Abyss: Putting Group Genius to Work with Gayle Pergamit.

Paul Saffo is a forecaster and essayist with over two decades experience exploring long-term technological change and its practical impact on business and society. Paul teaches at Stanford University and is on a research sabbatical from Institute for the Future where he has worked since 1985. He was the founding Chairman of the Samsung Science Board, and serves on a variety of other boards including the Long Now Foundation, the Singapore National Research Foundation Science Advisory Board and is an Advisor to Red Planet Capital, and 3i Venture Capital. Paul also has served as an advisor and Forum Fellow to the World Economic Forum, and is a Fellow of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences. His essays have appeared in numerous publications, including The Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Wired, The Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, The New York Times and the Washington Post. Paul holds degrees from Harvard College, Cambridge University, and Stanford University.

Peter Voss is an entrepreneur with a background in electronics, computer systems, business and technical software, as well as management. He has a keen interest in cognitive science and the inter-relationship between philosophy, psychology, ethics and computer science. Since the early 90’s he has been researching and developing AGI (artificial general intelligence), and in 2001 started Adaptive A.I. Inc., with the express goal of developing a commercially viable general-purpose AI engine. He considers himself an Extropian, and is actively involved in futurism, free-market ideas, and extreme life-extension.

Wendell Wallach has been a consultant, entrepreneur, and educator over his career. In 2001, after working in the microcomputer industry for 18 years, he sold Farpoint Solutions, a consulting company he co-founded and managed, to focus his attention on writing projects and to work with charities. He is presently co-authoring a book, Robot Morality: The Prospects of Developing an Artificial Moral Agent, forthcoming from MIT Press. He is also writing Cybersoul: Moral Intelligence in the Information Age, about how cognitive science and the Information Age have changed our understanding of human decision-making and ethics. Each summer, he co-chairs a symposium in Baden Baden, Germany, “Cognitive, Emotive, and Ethical Aspects of Decision Making In Humans and in Artificial Intelligence (AI)” for the International Institute for Advanced Studies in Systems Research and Cybernetics.

Eliezer Yudkowsky is one of the world’s foremost researchers on Friendly AI and recursive self-improvement. He 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. In 2001, he published the first technical analysis of motivationally stable goal systems, with his book-length Creating Friendly AI: The Analysis and Design of Benevolent Goal Architectures. In 2002, he wrote “Levels of Organization in General Intelligence,” a paper on the evolutionary psychology of human general intelligence, published in the edited volume Artificial General Intelligence (Springer, 2006). He has two papers forthcoming in the edited volume Global Catastrophic Risks (Oxford, 2007), “Cognitive Biases Potentially Affecting Judgment of Global Risks” and “Artificial Intelligence as a Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk.”