The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence has announced the details of The Singularity Summit 2008. The event will be held October 25, 2008 at the Montgomery Theater in San Jose, California. Previous summits have featured Nick Bostrom, Eric Drexler, Douglas Hofstadter, Ray Kurzweil, and Peter Thiel.
Keynote speakers include Ray Kurzweil, author of The Singularity is Near, and Justin Rattner, CTO of Intel. At the Intel Developer Forum on August 21, 2008, Rattner explained why he thinks the gap between humans and machines will close by 2050. “Rather than look back, we’re going to look forward 40 years,” said Rattner. “It’s in that future where many people think that machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence.”
Other featured speakers include:
- Dr. Ben Goertzel, CEO of Novamente, director of research at SIAI
- Dr. Marvin Minsky
- Nova Spivack, CEO of Radar Networks, creator of Twine.com
- Dr. Vernor Vinge
- Eliezer Yudkowsky
You can find a comprehensive list of other upcoming Singularity and Artificial Intelligence events here.
Hmm, This is sooner than I thought.
If machine and humans reach parity at 2050; By Moore’s law, 18 months later, it’ll be double our intelligence. A mere 7.5 years later, or about 2057.5; it would be 32 times our intelligence.
Even if we assume it takes twice as long to progress; it’ll still reach 32 times at 2064.
Scary!
Actually, the real cost of interstellar travel is either time+resources, or a drastic change in our understanding of physics. Right now, the energy requirements are not so much prohibitive, and impossible, for anything like FTL, and any other method involves generation ships.Travel into space is a tad less unlikely, though getting to nearby objects, other than the moon, is a tad more problematic. Their are ways, most of them are going to require someone seeing a way to make a big enough profit to do it, and spending stupid amounts of money on it. It would take a project like the one someone proposed a while back to link some part of Russia with Alaska, to provide non-flight means to connect to Europe. Possible, but the logistics, and the cost With space, its the same problem, any method we can think of that might work, like using a rail launch, to provide initial acceleration, to save fuel, comes with other costs, both in building and running it, which, without the government using tax money to fund it, no corporation is *ever* going to finance.