...has finally been published.
Contents:
- Uziel Awret - Introduction
- Susan Blackmore - She Won’t Be Me
- Damien Broderick - Terrible Angels: The Singularity and Science Fiction
- Barry Dainton - On Singularities and Simulations
- Daniel Dennett - The Mystery of David Chalmers
- Ben Goertzel - Should Humanity Build a Global AI Nanny to Delay the Singularity Until It’s Better Understood?
- Susan Greenfield - The Singularity: Commentary on David Chalmers
- Robin Hanson - Meet the New Conflict, Same as the Old Conflict
- Francis Heylighen - Brain in a Vat Cannot Break Out
- Marcus Hutter - Can Intelligence Explode?
- Drew McDermott - Response to ‘The Singularity’ by David Chalmers [this link is a McDermott-corrected version, and therefore preferred to the version that was published in JCS]
- Jurgen Schmidhuber - Philosophers & Futurists, Catch Up!
- Frank Tipler - Inevitable Existence and Inevitable Goodness of the Singularity
- Roman Yampolskiy - Leakproofing the Singularity: Artificial Intelligence Confinement Problem
The issue consists of responses to Chalmers (2010). Future volumes will contain additional articles from Shulman & Bostrom, Igor Aleksander, Richard Brown, Ray Kurzweil, Pamela McCorduck, Chris Nunn, Arkady Plotnitsky, Jesse Prinz, Susan Schneider, Murray Shanahan, Burt Voorhees, and a response from Chalmers.
McDermott's chapter should be supplemented with this, which he says he didn't have space for in his JCS article.
That seems more likely than a secretive monoplolistic agent keeping the technology for themselves from the beginning - and obliterating all potential rivals.
Keeping the technology of general-purpose inductive inference secret seems unlikely to happen in practice. It is going to go into embedded devices - from which it will inevitably be reverse engineered and made publicly accessible. Also, it's likely to arise from a public collaborative development effort in the first place. I am inclined to doubt whether anyone can win while keeping their technology on a secure server - try to do that and you will just be overtaken - or rather, you will never be in the lead in the first place.
Not pessimism, realism, is my assessment. You have to apply your efforts where they will actually make a difference.