This Business Insider article on the outcome so far of the Thiel Fellowship experiment is interesting, though not surprising..

Recent dramatic progress in artificial intelligence (AI) leads us to believe that Ray Kurzweil’s prediction of human level AI by 2029 may be roughly accurate. Even if reality proves to be a bit different, still it seems very likely that today’s young people will spend most of their lives in a world largely shaped by AI.

this article was co-written with Bill Hibbard, Nick Baladis, Hruy Tsegaye, and David Hanson

IEET Fellow Ben Goertzel is promoting an Indigogo campaign to complete YaNetu, a project that would provide AI tablets to African children.

IEET Fellow Ben Goertzel is featured in a WIRED article on his company, Aidyia, that “turned on a hedge fund that makes all stock trades using artificial intelligence—no human intervention required.”

Mascot Information and Technology Solutions held the maiden edition of Nigeria ICT Fest on December 4, 2015 at Magrellos fast food, Festac Town, Lagos, and December 5, 2015 at Radisson Blu Anchorage hotel at No. 1A, Ozumba Mbadiwe Avenue, Victoria Island, Lagos, to bridge the technology gap between Nigeria and the developed world.

Generally obviously OpenAI is a super-impressive initiative.   I mean —  a BILLION freakin’ dollars, for open-source AI, wow!!

So now we have an organization with a pile of money available and a mandate to support open-source AI, and a medium-term goal of AGI … and they seem fairly open-minded and flexible/adaptive about how to pursue their mandate, from what I can tell…

Ben Goertzel (IEET Fellow), James Hughes (IEET Executive Director), and Giulio Prisco (IEET Board or Director member) are referenced in the January issue of Harper’s Magazine in an article titled “Everything That Rises.”

In a recent blog post, I have proposed two general theses regarding the future value systems of human-level and transhuman AGI systems: the Value Learning Thesis (VLT) and Value Evolution Thesis (VET).  This post pursues the same train of thought further – attempting to make these ideas more concrete via speculating about how the VLT and VET might manifest themselves in the context of an advanced version of the OpenCog AGI platform.

IEET Board Member Giulio Prisco and IEET Contributing Writer Micah Redding were recently featured in a MotherboardVICE article titled The Turing Church Preaches the Future of Religion.

This year we’ve seen a flurry of activity at the intersection of transhumanism and contemporary politics – the emergence of Transhumanist Parties in several different countries, and Zoltan Istvan’s controversial, mostly theatrical run for US President (see this article for a brief summary of some of the controversy).