He seems to go back and forth from day to day. Over all though he's definitely skeptical that we can steer the Singularity and doesn't think it's coming soon, but he thinks the logic of it makes it likely in the long term.
I doubt it. I've never heard him say anything that suggested he was. For that matter, I doubt that Irene Pepperberg is a Singularitan either. But lots of stuff that is of interest to the Singularitans is of interest to people who assign a low probability to a Singularity. Many of the people who go to the Summit don't consider the Singularity to be imminent.
Intelligence Augmentation is not much of "another route". I argue that Intelligence Augmentation synergetically complements machine intelligence approaches here:
"Intelligence augmentation" - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQXVWvtCjJs
The point is that even with only moderate intelligence, if you speed that intelligence up enough you can potentially have a lot of gains. Thus for example, if you took a moderately smart human (say an average Less Wrongian) and were able to think a hundred times as fast, they'd be pretty damn productive, even if their overall creativity was not that much higher. Now, we don't know what the minimal processing power it takes to create an intelligence. Imagine for example what it would turn out if you could simulate in realtime an intelligence of about a human on an old 486 and that the main issue was just figuring out the algorithms. That means, that a cheap commercial machine computer now can run that AI at around a thousand times as fast as a human. Now, you may object that you find it implausible that an AI would be able to run in real time on a 486. That's ok. Do you think it is plausible it could run on a machine today if we had the algorithms? Ok. Then imagine what happens if we find those algorithms 20 years from now. The same end result. Unless you believe that we will coincidentally discover how to make general AI at about the same time we have precisely the processing power to run them, they will likely be quite fast little buggers.
Thats a misconception. We're not trying to simulate human or human-like brains. IMO, NNs and the like are dead ends. The AI project I'm currently working on will be (theoretically) able to run on any machine. The thing is, that on a super fast machine, it can just spend extra time analyzing problems, while on the slow one it will probably have to spend most of its time figuring out how to do the problem without wasting so much power. So, yes, there is a definite advantage in speed, but it will always be as efficient as possible given the power it has. So measuring intelligence by how well it does compared to a human isn't practical. With that, a calculator could be argued to be thousands of times faster then a human.
The Singularity Summit 2010 will be held on August 14th and 15th at the Hyatt Regency in San Francisco, and will feature Ray Kurzweil and famed Traditional Rationalist James Randi as speakers, in addition to numerous others. During last year's Summit (in New York City), there was a very large Less Wrong meetup with dozens of attendees, and it is quite possible that there will be one again this year. Anyone interested in planning such a meetup (not just attending) should contact the Singularity Institute at institute@intelligence.org. The Singularity Summit press release follows after the jump.
Singularity Summit 2010 returns to San Francisco, explores intelligence augmentation
Speakers include Futurist Ray Kurzweil, Magician-Skeptic James Randi
Will it be one day become possible to boost human intelligence using brain implants, or create an artificial intelligence smarter than Einstein? In a 1993 paper presented to NASA, science fiction author and mathematician Vernor Vinge called such a hypothetical event a “Singularity”, saying “From the human point of view this change will be a throwing away of all the previous rules, perhaps in the blink of an eye”. Vinge pointed out that intelligence enhancement could lead to “closing the loop” between intelligence and technology, creating a positive feedback effect.
This August 14-15, hundreds of AI researchers, robotics experts, philosophers, entrepreneurs, scientists, and interested laypeople will converge in San Francisco to address the Singularity and related issues at the only conference on the topic, the Singularity Summit. Experts in fields including animal intelligence, artificial intelligence, brain-computer interfacing, tissue regeneration, medical ethics, computational neurobiology, augmented reality, and more will share their latest research and explore its implications for the future of humanity.
“This year, the conference shifts to a focus on neuroscience, bioscience, cognitive enhancement, and other explorations of what Vernor Vinge called ‘intelligence amplification’ — the other route to the Singularity,” said Michael Vassar, president of the Singularity Institute, which is hosting the event.
Irene Pepperberg, author of “Alex & Me,” who has pushed the frontier of animal intelligence with her research on African Gray Parrots, will explore the ethical and practical implications of non-human intelligence enhancement and of the creation of new intelligent life less powerful than ourselves. Futurist-inventor Ray Kurzweil will discuss reverse-engineering the brain and his forthcoming book, How the Mind Works and How to Build One. Allan Synder, Director, Centre for the Mind at the University of Sydney, will explore the use of transcranial magnetic stimulation for the enhancement of narrow cognitive abilities. Joe Tsien will talk about the smarter rats and mice that he created by tuning the molecular substrate of the brain’s learning mechanism. Steve Mann, “the world’s first cyborg,” will demonstrate his latest geek-chic inventions: wearable computers now used by almost 100,000 people.
Other speakers will include magician-skeptic and MacArthur Genius Award winner James Randi; Gregory Stock (Redesigning Humans), former Director of the Program on Medicine, Technology, and Society at UCLA’s School of Public Health; Terry Sejnowski, Professor and Laboratory Head, Salk Institute Computational Neurobiology Laboratory, who believes we are just ten years away from being able to upload ourselves; Ellen Heber-Katz, Professor, Molecular and Cellular Oncogenesis Program at The Wistar Institute, who is investigating the molecular basis of wound regeneration in mutant mice, which can regenerate limbs, hearts, and spinal cords; Anita Goel, MD, physicist, and CEO of nanotechnology company Nanobiosym; and David Hanson, Founder & CEO, Hanson Robotics, who is creating the world’s most realistic humanoid robots.
Interested readers can watch videos from past summits and register at www.singularitysummit.com.