Special Report: Singularity Summit at Stanford University
I first met Stefan Richter at ECLM 2006 and we connected instantly. No need for a secret handshake. He prepared a special report about the Singularity Summit at Stanford University.
After visiting ECLM 2006 in Hamburg and having a nice talk with Markus at the Gastwerk hotel bar about AI, Lisp, Singularity and the Universe, I found the following announcement on the net:
"On June 13th the Singularity Institute (http://www.singinst.org) will organize a Singularity Summit at Stanford University, California.
Speakers include: Ray Kurzweil, Douglas R. Hofstadter, Nick Bostrom, Sebastian Thrun, Cory Doctorow, K. Eric Drexler, Max More, Christine Peterson, John Smart and Eliezer Yudkowsky."
This very interesting line-up of speakers must have caused a temporary brain damage in my head, because I decided to sign-up and fly to San Francisco over the weekend, arriving on friday and leaving on sunday. I was even able to convince a fellow hacker to join the trip. After signing up and mentioning, that we come over from Germany just to participate in this event, we even received some kind of special treatment with a personal mail confirmation from Tyler Emerson.
Friday we visited a friend at Google who also joined us on the Summit and had good food and coffee at the Googleplex, .
Saturday started early: We arrived a 0730 at the Memorial Auditorium and found a big, long queue of Summit-Visitors: There were more then 2000 registrations for this free-of-charge event! Okay, we are in San Francisco...
Ray Kurzweil's talk was more or less a summary of the first 200 pages of his new book "The singularity is near", but still very motivating.
I was very curious about Douglas R. Hofstadter. His talk invited the other speakers and the academic world to enter a discourse on the topic of singularity. He said, that he is "less sceptic now", but would be very surprised, if we reach Singularity in less then 100-200 years. He also pointed out, that Kurzweil is sometimes mixing science with science fiction and said: "How secure can I be of the sanity of this person?" (This was about the moment, when we took the picture ;-) ).
The other speakers didn't pick up on that. Everybody else had more or less his own agenda and topics. No discourse. But interesting. For more fotos, videos, audio and transcripts, you can visit the singinst.org Site (http://sss.stanford.edu/coverage/press/). Very nice are the self-made cartoons, that Hofstadter used in his presentation.
One of the best presentations came from science fiction writer, boingboing-blogger and EFF member Cory Doctorow, who talked about the evils of Digital Rights (or more precise: "Restrictions") Management (DRM). Maybe this has not so much todo with Singularity in the first place, but DRM is a danger to the freedom of information and culture, so it affects the matter we are writing programs for. EFF just published the nice animated film "The Corruptibles" about the real goals of DRM technology: http://www.eff.org/corrupt/
Think about it.
So let's hope, that in 2045 the first version of Seed-AI will not be sued from the media industry and put into custody because of copyright infringements, because she was consuming all books, music and films to better understand the human culture."
