IEET fellow, Jamais Cascio, blogs Vernor Vinge & Ben Goertzel concerning
Uplift Academy's "Good Ancestor Principle Workshop" in San Diego (Feb
4-5, 2007):
blog post: http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/cascio20070208
snip:
"Instead, we ran right past the "human++" scenario right into the
Singularity---and with Vernor Vinge
<http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/singularity.html> in
attendance, this is hardly surprising. (Not that Vinge is dead-certain
that the Singularity is on its way; when he speaks next week at the Long
Now seminar <http://longnow.org/projects/seminars/> in San Francisco,
he'll be covering what change looks like in a world where a Singularity
doesn't happen.) This group of philosophers and writers really take the
Singularity concept seriously, and not for Kurzweilian "let's all get
uploaded into Heaven 2.0" reasons. Their recurring question had a strong
evolutionary theme: what niche is left for humans if machines become
ascendant?
The conversation about the Singularity touched on more than science
fiction stories, because of the attendance of Ben Goertzel
<http://www.goertzel.org/>, a cognitive science/computer science
specialist who runs a company called "Novamente
<http://www.novamente.net/>"---a company with the express goal of
creating the first Artificial General Intelligence
<http://www.agiri.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page> (AGI). He has a
working theory of how to do it, some early prototypes
<http://www.novamente.net/engine/> (that for now exist solely in virtual
environments), and a small number of employees in the US and Brazil. He
says that with the right funding, his team would be able to produce a
working AGI system within ten years
<http://www.goertzel.org/papers/tenyears.htm>. With his current funding,
it might take a bit longer."
Uplift Academy's Good Ancestor Principle Workshop 2007:
http://www.upliftacademy.org/wiki/index.php?title=GAP2007
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