Alex_Altair comments on Suggest alternate names for the "Singularity Institute" - Less Wrong

24 Post author: lukeprog 19 June 2012 04:42AM

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Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 19 June 2012 05:55:45AM *  23 points [-]

It's worth noting that your current name has advantages too; people who are interested in the accelerating change singularity will naturally run into you guys. These are people, some pretty smart, who are at home with weird ideas and like thinking about the far future. Isn't this how Louie found out about SI?

Maybe instead of changing your name, you could spin out yet another organization (with most of your current crew) to focus on AI risk, and leave the Singularity Institute as it is to sponsor the Singularity Summit and so on. My impression is that SI has a fairly high brand value, so I would think twice before discarding part of that. Additionally, I know at least one person assumed the Singularity Summit was all you guys did. So having the summit organized independently of the main AI risk thrust could be good.

Comment author: Alex_Altair 19 June 2012 06:25:28AM 2 points [-]

The spin-off sounds a little appealing to me too, but the problem is that the Summit provides a lot of their revenue.

Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 19 June 2012 11:12:07PM 1 point [-]

Good point. Maybe this could continue to happen though with sufficiently clever lawyering.