Gaia: The Singularity

IEEE Spectrum: Special Report on The Singularity

http://coolmel.gaia.com — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 20:35:34 GMT

The Singularity: A Special Report

http://spectrum.ieee.org/singularity

Project Blue Brain

http://coolmel.gaia.com — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 09:43:49 GMT

via Seed: Out of the Blue

Can a thinking, remembering, decision-making, biologically accurate brain be built from a supercomputer?

In the basement of a university in Lausanne, Switzerland sit four black boxes, each about the size of a refrigerator, and filled with 2,000 IBM microchips stacked in repeating rows. Together they form the processing core of a machine that can handle 22.8 trillion operations per second. It contains no moving parts and is eerily silent. When the computer is turned on, the only thing you can hear is the continuous sigh of the massive air conditioner. This is Blue Brain.

The name of the supercomputer is literal: Each of its microchips has been programmed to act just like a real neuron in a real brain. The behavior of the computer replicates, with shocking precision, the cellular events unfolding inside a mind. "This is the first model of the brain that has been built from the bottom-up," says Henry Markram, a neuroscientist at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and the director of the Blue Brain project. "There are lots of models out there, but this is the only one that is totally biologically accurate. We began with the most basic facts about the brain and just worked from there."

Before the Blue Brain project launched, Markram had likened it to the Human Genome Project, a comparison that some found ridiculous and others dismissed as mere self-promotion. When he launched the project in the summer of 2005, as a joint venture with IBM, there was still no shortage of skepticism. Scientists criticized the project as an expensive pipedream, a blatant waste of money and talent. Neuroscience didn't need a supercomputer, they argued; it needed more molecular biologists. Terry Sejnowski, an eminent computational neuroscientist at the Salk Institute, declared that Blue Brain was "bound to fail," for the mind remained too mysterious to model. But Markram's attitude was very different. "I wanted to model the brain because we didn't understand it," he says. "The best way to figure out how something works is to try to build it from scratch."

Read more

Singularity Summit 2007

http://coolmel.gaia.com — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 01:54:58 GMT

(via http://www.singinst.org/summit2007/)

The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence presents the Singularity Summit 2007, a major two-day event bringing together 18 leading thinkers to address and debate a historical moment in humanity's history – a window of opportunity to shape how we develop advanced artificial intelligence. We invite you to join us.

See the list of speakers.

What is the Singularity?

For over a hundred thousand years, the evolved human brain has held a privileged place in the expanse of cognition. Within this century, science may move humanity beyond its boundary of intelligence. This possibility, the singularity, may be a critical event in history, and deserves thoughtful consideration. More

Get our PDF about the Singularity and SIAI

Watch the Summit 2006 videos here.

Ray Kurzweil's Keynote @ Killer App Expo

http://coolmel.gaia.com — Mon, 21 May 2007 16:52:22 GMT

Ray Kurzweil's Keynote @ Killer App Expo

Exploring Life Extensions

http://coolmel.gaia.com — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 21:22:51 GMT

Check out this very interesting video:

Exploring Life Extensions:

A film by the Immortality Institute that explores various aspects of extreme life extension including cryonics (cryogenics), caloric restriction, transhumanism, and other scientific pursuits of extreme life extension.

What do you think? Discuss.

So, Would You Drink It?

http://coolmel.gaia.com — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 21:40:35 GMT

Here's a video of Dr. Michio Kaku hosting a BBC FOUR (Time Series).

“Why is our time limited? And does it have to be? Could our age-old dream of immortality ever be possible? In episode two, Michio Kaku explores these questions and meets some of the key people involved in the cutting-edge research into ageing.”

So would you drink it? Heck, I would :)

Gelernter, Kurzweil debate machine consciousness

http://coolmel.gaia.com — Sun, 03 Dec 2006 23:23:27 GMT

very cool debate on the (im)possibility of machine consciousness...

Gelernter, Kurzweil debate machine consciousness

KurzweilAI.net, Nov. 30, 2006

The debate between Yale professor of computer science David Gelernter and Ray Kurzweil, sponsored by the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, is now available for viewing (RealPlayer 8 or later required--help here).

The debate focused on the feasibility of building a conscious computer on a digital substrate. Gelernter argued that the chemical makeup of the brain and the body itself are essential in creating consciousness and that "there is no a priori reason for accepting that we can achieve consciousness in anything but a living organism."

Kurzweil countered that we are in fact making exponential progress in modeling the human brain and that some of its functions have been modeled with remarkable precision. "Within a quarter century, we will have detailed models and simulations of the brain and we won't be able to tell them apart," he said.

They agreed that ultimately, the issue involves philosophical assumptions about the meaning of "consciousness."

A talk by B. Jack Copeland on "Alan Turing, Codebreaker and Artificial Intelligence Pioneer" follows the debate on the webcast.

Also see: MIT press release

Re: Ken Wilber's Singularity?

http://coolmel.gaia.com — Sat, 23 Sep 2006 20:09:16 GMT

exactly! :)

Re: Ken Wilber's Singularity?

Sat, 23 Sep 2006 05:43:06 GMT

Man, that is beautiful. Ken is a true artist once he cuts lose. Thanks for posting this, Mel. I missed it in WIE.

Ken Wilber's Singularity?

http://coolmel.gaia.com — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 06:15:37 GMT

(excerpt from WIE: Kosmic Questions)

WIE editors asking Ken Wilber about anything. here's something about Ken's version of the "singularity."

Q: Finally, we’d like to ask you to let your imagination run wild. Please describe, in a stream of consciousness, an unabashedly utopian vision of a truly enlightened future . . . a world theocracy in which the nondual God becomes the organizing principle. Picture the year 2316 . . .

KW: Right, but my imagination jams at the beginning on the word “theocracy” because in the past that has meant mythic-theocracy, which is what we don’t want now. Go to Iran if that is what you want. But a truly enlightened future, in my opinion, would be one in which the center of gravity of the culture is at violet or higher, and states of consciousness are navigated at will, which would almost certainly be accompanied by brain/computer interfacing. Virtually all material wants will have been vanquished by nanotech (I’m with Ray Kurzweil on that), and the environmental crisis is long ended. The main concern for such a society is how to help individuals move up the great spiral of development and spectrum of consciousness because all exterior goods and needs have long ago been met. So what’s a poor culture to do?

Interior growth alone will answer that call. And interior growth demands structures and stages, which—unlike states—cannot be induced by drugs, meditation, or brain/mind machines. Addressing this need for interior growth will be the call of tomorrow’s integral culture.

Once that challenge is met, and I believe it will be, the second major problem will be the simple fact that, even in an ultraviolet culture, everybody is still born at square one, at infrared, and must begin their evolution and development from there. Even in today’s society, whose center of gravity is orange/green, everybody is born at square one, which is why we still have pockets of red culture (in street gangs, for example) and amber culture (in all of Kansas, it seems). But those types of problems will not disappear in any conceivable future, so they will need to be addressed creatively.

Then, the extraordinary states and stages available today only to those who work incredibly hard (via meditation, therapy, yoga, etc.) will be commonplace to all. The very Ground of All Being will be as obvious as one’s original face, as vast Emptiness announces both Freedom and Fullness for all souls, an ecstatic release and quiet riot of spiritual radiance drenching each and all, as eternity falls in love with the productions of time all over again, so that looking deep within, one can find only the entire Kosmos, with galaxies swirling where you thought your heart was and supernovas exploding in the middle of what used to be your mind, and spirit itself as simple and obvious as the sound of the rainfall on what is left of the old and forlorn world, long gone in time, never found in space, this simple and ever-present feeling of Being, now and now and endlessly now.

The Singularity and Global Warming

http://coolmel.gaia.com — Sun, 13 Aug 2006 15:21:55 GMT

(re-posted via Numinous Nonsense: The Singularity and Global Warming)

Thanks Dawg!

The Singularity and Global Warming

While I take global warming very seriously, and am committed to taking specific actions to help prevent it, it’s interesting to consider the perspective of techno-enthusiast Ray Kurzweil, as his opinions and models for predicting the future tend to re-frame everything. From a question and answer piece published in the Washington Post this summer, in response to questions of global warming:

"Columbia, Md.: I have been following your career with great interest since my office acquired one of your first reading machines. And I have been fascinated by the SINGULARITY IS NEAR. I am also impressed with Al Gore’s arguments that the global warming problem should be near the top of everyone’s agenda. He claims that climate scientists say we have only about ten years, absent a concerted effort and political will to solve the problem, before the planet has reached a point where it’s too late to prevent catastrophic consequences. Do you believe, given your arguments about progress acceleration, that these scientists are unduly pessimistic? Do you think that accelerated technology alone—even without political will to solve the problem—will save the planet?

Ray Kurzweil: None of the global warming discussions mention the word “nanotechnology.” Yet nanotechnology will eliminate the need for fossil fuels within 20 years. If we captured 1% of 1% of the sunlight (1 part in 10,000) we could meet 100% of our energy needs without ANY fossil fuels. We can’t do that today because the solar panels are too heavy, expensive, and inefficient. But there are new nanoengineered designs that are much more effective. Within five to six years, this technology will make a significant contribution. Within 20 years, it can provide all of our energy needs. The discussions talk about current trends continuing for the next century as if nothing is going to change. I think global warming is real but it has been modest thus far - 1 degree f. in 100 years. It would be concern if that continued or accelerated for a long period of time, but that’s not going to happen. And it’s not just environmental concern that will drive this, the $2 trillion we spend on energy is providing plenty of economic incentive. I don’t see any disasters occuring in the next 10 years from this. However, I AM concerned about other environment issues. There are other reasons to want to move quickly away from fossil fuels including environmental pollution at every step and the geopolitical instability it causes."

So this argument would seem to support C4’s seeing global warming *as if* it will be a problem. It must also be noted that while I appreciate Kurzweil’s perspective, I never lay my hat on any of his predictions.

Follow the discussion on Numinous Nonsense or post your reactions here.

KurzweilAI.Net: The Singularity

http://coolmel.gaia.com — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 10:25:05 GMT

The Singularity

"The Singularity" is a phrase borrowed from the astrophysics of black holes. The phrase has varied meanings; as used by Vernor Vinge and Raymond Kurzweil, it refers to the idea that accelerating technology will lead to superhuman machine intelligence that will soon exceed human intelligence, probably by the year 2030. The results on the other side of the "event horizon," they say, are unpredictable. We'll try anyway.

Read all Singularity articles from KurzweilAI.Net

WIRED: It's Alive (ish)

http://coolmel.gaia.com — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 10:20:15 GMT

It's Alive (ish)

When Rene Descartes said, "I think, therefore I am," the philosopher probably didn't imagine a stamp-sized clump of rat neurons grown in a dish, hooked to a computer.

For years, scientists have learned about brain development by watching the firing patterns of lab-raised brain cells. Until recently, though, the brains-in-a-dish couldn't receive information. Unlike actual gray matter, they could only send signals.

Scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology figured they could learn more from neuron clumps that acted more like real brains, so they've developed "neurally controlled animats" -- a few thousand rat neurons grown atop a grid of electrodes and connected to a robot body or computer-simulated virtual environment.

Re: Singularity News

http://coolmel.gaia.com — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 14:01:59 GMT

sweet! thanks for posting this. feel free to post some more :)

Singularity News

Tue, 25 Jul 2006 05:53:01 GMT

Crossposted for my blog, Deepsurface.net

On Friday, Reuters published this article: Paralyzed Man Uses Thoughts to Move a Cursor.

When the device was to be used, technicians plugged a cable connected to a computer into the pedestal. So Mr. Nagle was directly wired to a computer, somewhat like a character in the “Matrix” movies.

And the most recent episode of Studio 360 explored various ways the line blurs between computer entertainment and reality. It covers a range of topics, from an artist who makes a living from hacked 80’s video games to an interview with Richard Linklater. He directed A Scanner Darkly, yet another movie from a Phillip K. Dick about what makes us human. These segments focus attention on the various ways computers define us as a society and as individuals.

Yesterday, Ray Kurtzweil was on Talk of the Nation discussing an opinion piece he wrote for the Philadelphia Enquirer. He writes:

A key point to keep in mind as we contemplate the future: The pace of change is accelerating.

And that means our power to expand the boundaries of human knowledge and accomplishment is accelerating, too.

That the pace of change is accelerating may seem obvious, but most people fail to take it into consideration. According to my models, we are doubling the “paradigm-shift rate” (roughly the rate of technical progress) every decade, so we’ll see twice the change in the next decade that we saw in the last, four times the change in the next 20 years that we saw in the last 20, and so on.

The power of information technology is doubling even faster: in less than one year. This means that information technology, as measured by price performance and capacity, will multiply by 1,000 in less than a decade and 1 billion in 25 years. At the same time, we are shrinking the size of technology by a 100 (per 3-D volume) each decade, so the key features of our technology will be 100,000 times smaller in 25 years. That means the equivalent of your iPod nano will be smaller than a human hair. (read the rest)

And finally, today I woke up to a Morning Edition segment describing new technological tools being tested by soldiers. “The army is considering new battle gear that loads the grunts up with 17 pounds of electronic gadgets… There’s really no other way to put this. The soldiers that have been outfitted with the new gear look like the borg- All just moving parts of a battle-field computer network.”

I’m still working through Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near, but I’m already convinced that humanity is in the middle of a massive shift toward a time when “humans transcend biology”, that book’s sub-title. I have become a Singulatarian.

So what is the Singularity?

Sometime in the next few years or decades, humanity will become capable of surpassing the upper limit on intelligence that has held since the rise of the human species. We will become capable of technologically creating smarter-than-human intelligence, perhaps through enhancement of the human brain, direct links between computers and the brain, or Artificial Intelligence. This event is called the “Singularity” by analogy with the singularity at the center of a black hole - just as our current model of physics breaks down when it attempts to describe the center of a black hole, our model of the future breaks down once the future contains smarter-than-human minds. Since technology is the product of cognition, the Singularity is an effect that snowballs once it occurs - the first smart minds can create smarter minds, and smarter minds can produce still smarter minds. - from the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence

For more, listen to this archive Science Friday interview with Kurzweil from last year and check out KurzweilAI.net for the latest developments and discussions related to “accelerating intelligence.”

[Edit: 6.22.06] ~C4 posts a related link: Surfing the Web with nothing but brainwaves. It looks like things are happening faster than I thought.

…So if improved hardware is all it takes to speed up the device, Cyberkinetics’ chip could be able to process thoughts as fast as speech - 110 to 170 words per minute - by 2012. Imagine issuing commands to a computer as quickly as you could talk. (read the whole article)

Re: Artificial Intelligence

Sun, 02 Jul 2006 07:56:27 GMT

That's a very good point. The architectures are fundamentally different, so machines have certainly not duplicated human intelligence. It's a matter of degree; my own intelligence is not a duplicate of my teachers' intelligence either.

My view is that machine intelligence is more or less human-level intelligence, certainly compared to chimp-level intelligence, but it is a non-human intelligence, almost an alien intelligence, something that we are psychologically inclined not even to recognize as intelligence.

In principle, if we understood the analog circuits of the brain, we could either simulate them digitally in software or implement them directly in hardware with analog electronics. I tend to think that human intelligence and machine intelligence will continue to diverge. We could build calculators that are as slow and error-prone as humans, but we don't.

Re: Artificial Intelligence

http://telesterion.gaia.com — Sun, 02 Jul 2006 05:20:59 GMT

Well, if the brain has a bunch of analog tools that help generate human intelligence, a computer could be vastly bigger, and process vastly faster, and still not duplicate human intelligence.

If we understood those analog tools are recreated them for the supercomputers, that might be a solution to the ai problem.

Re: Artificial Intelligence

Sun, 25 Jun 2006 06:05:32 GMT

Of course it's a limited subset of the human experience. My own behavior is a limited subset of the human experience. So is yours.

It does come down to a definition of intelligence. My original point was that humans will try to define intelligence in such a way as to exclude machines. You, being human, have done exactly that.

I do think it is possible to find objective measures of the complexity of behavior, for example via Algorithmic Information Theory (Chaitin). And certainly more intelligent entities exhibit more complex behavior. The converse also holds; we ascribe greater intelligence to people who exhibit more complex behavior.

The obvious conclusion is left as an exercise for the reader.

Re: Artificial Intelligence

http://greenbot.gaia.com — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 06:42:19 GMT

That's a limited subset of the human experience.

The intelligence comes in when we stop doing the "computer" task and seamlessly transition to a myriad of other tasks. We use the same systems in new and novel ways. I suppose the true argument comes to "what is the definition of intelligence".

Re: Artificial Intelligence

Thu, 22 Jun 2006 23:17:38 GMT

I could tell you some tech support stories about real, live human beings who had been trained to use computers but didn't have the flexibility to fill in the missing steps or deal with changing conditions.

I suppose we could talk about the difference between intelligence and training and conclude that these people were not intelligent. But that would be nonsense. These were regular people, of more or less normal intelligence. And if following instructions by rote without understanding them was the limit of their abilities, that just means that following instructions by rote IS human-level intelligence, whether it's done by humans or machines.

Believe me, if chimps could do the work, their employers would have hired chimps.

Gaia: The Singularity

IEEE Spectrum: Special Report on The Singularity

Project Blue Brain

Singularity Summit 2007

Ray Kurzweil's Keynote @ Killer App Expo

Exploring Life Extensions

So, Would You Drink It?

Gelernter, Kurzweil debate machine consciousness

Re: Ken Wilber's Singularity?

Re: Ken Wilber's Singularity?

Ken Wilber's Singularity?

The Singularity and Global Warming

KurzweilAI.Net: The Singularity

WIRED: It's Alive (ish)

It's Alive (ish)

Read more...

Re: Singularity News

Singularity News

Re: Artificial Intelligence

Re: Artificial Intelligence

Re: Artificial Intelligence

Re: Artificial Intelligence

Re: Artificial Intelligence