FYI: "Singularity Summit" @ Stanford

[Tom Johnson]

:: Stanford Summit to Explore Coming Era of 'Superintelligence'

Stanford University futurists are organizing a conference next month to
explore "Singularity," an era of theoretical human superintelligence created
as the rate of technology change accelerates over the coming decades.

The theory has been embraced by Ray Kurzweil, the noted inventor of
omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading
machine for the blind, and the text-to-speech synthesizer. "Based on models
of technology development that I've used to forecast technological change
successfully for more than 25 years, I believe.by the 2040s our civilization
will be billions of times more intelligent," Kurzweil said.

Kurzweil will speak at the event, dubbed the "Singularity Summit," and
sponsored by the Stanford University Symbolic Systems Program and the
Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
(http://newsletters.101com.com/c.asp?id=609591&l=10&c=01981cd12a4fbf0c
). The free one-day event is open to the public and will be held Saturday,
May 13, on the Stanford campus. "Some regard Singularity as a positive event
and work to hasten its arrival, while others view it as unlikely, or even
dangerous and undesirable," said Todd Davies, associate director of
Stanford's Symbolic Systems Program."

Speakers will include cognitive scientist Douglas R. Hofstadter, author of
the Pulitzer prize-winning G?del, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid;
nanotechnology pioneers K. Eric Drexler and Christine L. Peterson; and
science-fiction novelist Cory Doctorow.

Read more
http://newsletters.101com.com/c.asp?id=609591&l=11&c=01981cd12a4fbf0c


--
==============================================
J. T. Johnson
Institute for Analytic Journalism
www.analyticjournalism.com
505.577.6482 (c)                                 505.473.9646(h)
http://www.jtjohnson.com               tom at jtjohnson.com

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the
existing model obsolete."
                                                   -- Buckminster Fuller
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[Steve Smith]

On Apr 18, 2006, at 10:51 AM, Tom Johnson wrote:

>
>  :: Stanford Summit to Explore Coming Era of 'Superintelligence'
>
>  Stanford University futurists are organizing a conference next month
> to explore "Singularity," an era of theoretical human
> superintelligence created as the rate of technology change accelerates
> over the coming decades.
>
>  The theory has been embraced by Ray Kurzweil, the noted inventor of
> omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech
> reading machine for the blind, and the text-to-speech synthesizer.
> "Based on models of technology development that I've used to forecast
> technological change successfully for more than 25 years, I believe.by
> the 2040s our civilization will be billions of times more
> intelligent," Kurzweil said.

Coincidentally (or not), I was at the Iowa State Virtual Reality
Applications Center a few weeks ago (about the time Tom sent this out)
and Kurzweil was speaking (and signing his new book - "The Singularity
is Near").   I happened to have heard him speak when his "Age of
Spiritual Machines" came out as well.

  I'm a long time fan of Kurzweil's technical work and have plenty of
opinions about the "singularity" thing, with other's work informing me
more deeply than his, but never as broadly.

I was surprised that this announcement didn't bring out more
conversation here... this seems like a likely group of potential
"Singularians".

- Steve