Singularity Institute Newsletter: August-October 2010 Edition
Noteworthy happenings in the world of SIAI

Singularity Summit 2010 Held in San Francisco, California

The Singularity Institute’s annual conference,  the fifth annual Singularity Summit, was held August 14-15 in San Francisco. Singularity Summit-related coverage is available from the The Independent, Singularity Hub blog, Fight Aging blog, Accelerating Future blog, and SF Weekly. Over 600 scientists, entrepreneurs, academics, and laypeople gathered at the Hyatt Regency hotel in San Francisco for an exciting two days of talks by artificial intelligence researchers, a robotics genius, brain-computer interfacing pioneers, a self-proclaimed “cyborg”, computational neuroscientists, a regenerative medicine specialist, the co-founder of evolutionary psychology, the legendary magician-skeptic James Randi, the inventor and author Ray Kurzweil, and other stimulating speakers. One attendee described the conference as “Disneyland for geeks”, another as “like TED, for a fraction of the price”.

Almost 500 photos of Singularity Summit 2010 are available at our Flickr page. Footage from the conference is still being edited and will be available in December. Subscribe to the SIAI blog to be the first to know when videos are released, and for announcements about next year’s Singularity Summit. You can also visit the Singularity Summit Facebook page to see who else likes the event.

Singularity Institute Researchers Give Five Presentations at the European Conference on Computing and Philosophy in Munich

In early October, the 2010 European Computing and Philosophy (ECAP) conference was held at the Technical University of Munchen, including the 2nd year of the Singularity track. The Singularity Institute again provided financial sponsorship of attendance costs to enable several high-quality presentations, anchoring the track.

SIAI provided financial support enabling five of the peer-reviewed presentations. These papers were coauthored by SIAI research staff Anna Salamon and Steve Rayhawk, by past SIAI Visiting Fellows Steven Kaas, Janos Kramar, Carl Shulman, and Kaj Sotala, by long-time SIAI supporter and volunteer Joshua Fox, and by external academic coauthors Peter Salamon (professor of mathematics, SDSU) and Anders Sandberg (Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford University).

Amnon Eden, the track organizer and a professor of computer science at the University of Essex, also announced that after 2009’s successful event he had been contacted by academic publisher Springer to produce an edited volume on the technological singularity hypothesis. The website for the book, The Singularity Hypothesis: A Scientific And Philosophical Assessment, is already online, and will “invite contributions that offer a critical analysis of this hypothesis, assess its empirical and philosophical content, examine relevant evidence, and explore its implications.” Plans to develop some of the conference presentations into book chapter submissions were already forming as the conference drew to a close.

Video of Joshua Fox and Carl Shulman’s presentation can be found on the SIAI website, and a full writeup of the Singularity track at the conference is at Anders Sandberg’s blog. Here is a list of SIAI-supported presentations at ECAP:

“How intelligible is intelligence? Implications for AI development trajectories”
Anna Salamon, Steve Rayhawk, Janos Kramar

“Super-intelligence does not imply benevolence”
Joshua Fox, Carl Shulman

“From mostly harmless to civilization-threatening: pathways to superintelligence”
Kaj Sotala

“Economic Implications of Software Minds”
Steven Kaas, Peter Salamon, Anna Salamon, Steve Rayhawk

“Implications of a Software-limited Singularity”
Carl Shulman, Anders Sandberg

Singularity Summit AU 2010 Held in Melbourne, Australia

The Singularity Summit AU 2010 was held in Melbourne on September 7, 11, and 12th. This was the first Singularity Summit event outside of the United States, and was attended by about 120 people. The conference opened up Tuesday night with a presentation by artist Stelarc, a panel, and a presentation by biotech entrepreneur and best-selling author Gregory Benford. Over the weekend, the conference continued with over a dozen presentations and six panels, with excellent questions from the audience during extensive Q&A sessions. Abstracts for the talks can be accessed on the Singularity Summit AU website. A big congratulations goes to Adam Ford, who organized the Summit, and to everyone who attended and volunteered to make the event happen.  HIVE45, a Singularity-focused podcast and video show, covered the event. Presentations from the Summit will be made available online over the next couple months. You can also visit the Singularity Summit AU on Facebook.

New Research Fellow: Peter de Blanc

The Singularity Institute welcomes our fourth Research Fellow, Peter de Blanc, a long-time volunteer for SIAI and participant in our Visiting Fellows Program. Peter de Blanc is an AI researcher who studies machine learning and goal systems. He is responsible for keeping SIAI up to date on published AI research. He has written three papers on goal systems for decision-theoretic agents, including “Convergence of Expected Utility for Universal AI”, “Convergence of Expected Utilities for Probability Distributions”, and “Ontological Crises in Artificial Agents’ Value Systems”. He has also written about statistics, graph theory, and elections on his blog “Space and Games”. He holds an MA in mathematics from Temple University. You can follow de Blanc on Twitter at @spaceandgames.

Visiting Fellows Program Update

Over the year the SIAI Visiting Fellows Program has continued to run strong. In August and September, seven new Fellows arived: Ben Hoskin, Ron McCoy, Thomas Colthurst, Will Sawin, Paul Rhodes, Keefe Roedersheimer and Zachary Vance.

The Fellows have done a broad range of work, from assisting with the Singularity Summit and outreach to improving the Less Wrong codebase and conducting independent research. Topics investigated include decision theory, the application of Goodheart’s law to AI concept learning, backdoor routes to a positive singularity, and Ethics as Evolutionarily Stable Strategies in a Social Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma. Following is bio information on the new Fellows. For information on all the Fellows, check out the Visiting Fellows page at the SIAI website.

Keefe Roedersheimer is a software engineer working on a distributed knowledge base scheduled for release this fall. At SIAI, he is working on improvements to the Less Wrong codebase (e.g. new searches, karma system updates, SEO optimization) and studying the relationship between growth in computing power and the hardware requirements of whole brain emulation. He holds an MSc in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Notre Dame for work on optimizing treatment planning algorithms for radiosurgery and received security clearance to work on the Mission Operations Reconfiguration Systems project at Ames Research Center in 2008.

Thomas Colthurst holds an Sc. B. from Brown University and a Ph. D. from MIT, both in
mathematics. Thomas has published extensively in the field of large vocabulary, conversational speech recognition; he is also the designer of the board game “Barons”, which will be released in late 2010 by Cambridge Game Factory. Thomas currently works as a
software engineer at Google. While at the Singularity Institute in August, he worked with Anna Salamon and Ben Hoskin on a paper about the difficulties of learning human concepts from their statistical correlations.

Ben Hoskin is a Mathematics and Philosophy student at the University of Oxford. He holds the Robson Scholarship and was several times a gold certificate winner in the UKMT Challenge. While at the Singularity Institute, he worked with Anna Salamon and Thomas Colthurst on a paper about the difficulties of learning human concepts from their statistical correlations and with Steve Rayhawk on using game theory to formalize some of the psychology that shows up in metaethics.

Paul Rhodes is an economics student at George Mason University. He has a background in philosophy and studied political science at the University of Oxford. Rhodes played a close role in helping out with preparation for the Singularity Summit 2010 in San Francisco.

Future of the Visiting Fellows Program

With both the summer and the summit behind us, things have calmed down a bit in the Fellows Program. Jasen Murray (Program Manager) plans to keep the population small for the fall to focus on improving and restructuring the program and moving the Fellows house to Berkeley. In addition to the standard fare of collaborating with SIAI on papers, popular writing, and programming projects, future iterations of the fellows program will include a structured course on instrumental rationality — the art of using reason to “win at life.” Our plan is to develop a powerful set of tools that people can use to systematically acquire a deep understanding of how the world works and to provide an environment in which they are encouraged to continually practice using them. If all goes as planned, we will be doing a two to four week trial run this winter. Watch for updates and the call for participants.

Conference on December 4-5th: Humanity+ @ Caltech

SIAI supporters may be interested in an upcoming conference, Humanity+ @
Caltech: Redefining Humanity in the Era of Radical Technological Change. Humanity+@ Caltech,
which will take place on December 4-5 (Saturday/Sunday), at the Beckman Institute at Caltech in Los Angeles, California. Speakers will include many of the top visionaries and leaders of the transhumanist community, as well as new voices from the worlds of science, art, media and business.

The Humanity+ @ Caltech program will be divided into four main sessions, each one of which will cover a key area of transhumanist thought:

* Re-Imagining Humans: Mind, Media and Methods (Saturday morning)
* Radically Increasing the Human Healthspan (Saturday afternoon)
* Redefining Intelligence: Artificial Intelligence, Intelligence Enhancement and Substrate-Independent Minds (Sunday morning)
* Business and Economy in the Era of Radical Technomorphosis (Sunday afternoon)

Tickets for the conference will be $299 per person ($179 for students). If you register before November 1st, you will be eligible for a discounted, Early Registration price of $249 ($149 for students), so register today! There will also be a special banquet for conference attendees after the end of the first day, on Saturday evening. Tickets for the banquet are $39; space is limited, so register soon to ensure your seat. (Breakfast and lunch are included free for both days.)

Humanity+ conferences are open to everyone, but there is a discount for members. If you are a full member of Humanity+, you can get a 10% discount on conference registration, as well as discounts on future conferences. Humanity+ is also launching a new membership program, Plus membership, for transhumanist enthusiasts. Plus members will get a 50% discount on Humanity+ @ Caltech registration, and free or heavily discounted tickets to future conferences. We also expect to announce additional benefits for Plus members over the next year.

Humanity+ @ CalTech is hosted by the California Institute of Technology and ab|inventio, the invention factory behind QLess, Whozat, SocialDiligence and MyNew.TV. Sponsorship is also provided by TechZulu and Vokle.

Michael Anissimov and Robin Hanson to Present at Society for Risk Analysis Annual Meeting in December, Catastrophic Risks Workshop Supported by SIAI

Singularity Institute Media Director and Singularity Summit co-organizer Michael Anissimov will present on “Public Scholarship For Global Catastrophic Risks” at SRA 2010 in Salt Lake City on December 5-8. The meeting is open to anyone interested in risk analysis. Registration is $500. Friends of SIAI Robin Hanson and Seth Baum will also present at the conference, and Baum will be chairing a workshop enabled by SIAI donors. Anissimov’s presentation will be part of the Assessment, Communication and Perception of Nanotechnology track. A full session list is available. Seth Baum will be chairing the Methodologies for Global Catastrophic Risk Assessment track, where Robin Hanson will be giving his talk. Here are Anissimov and Hanson’s abstracts:

T3-F.4 14:30 Public Scholarship For Global Catastrophic Risks. Anissimov M*; Singularity Institute

Abstract: Global catastrophic risks (GCRs) are risks that threaten civilization on a global scale, including nuclear war, ecological collapse, pandemics, and poorly understood risks from emerging technologies such as nanotechnology and artificial intelligence. Public perception of GCRs is important because these risks and responses to them are often driven by public activities or by the public policies of democracies. However, much of the public perception is based on science fiction books and films, which unfortunately often lack scientific accuracy. This presentation describes an effort to improve public perceptions of GCR through public scholarship. Public scholarship is the process of bringing academic and other scholarship into the public sphere, often to inform democratic processes. The effort described here works on all GCRs and focuses on emerging technologies such as biotechnology and nanotechnology. The effort involves innovating use of blogs, social networking sites, and other new media platforms. This effort has already resulted in, among other things, a visible online community of thousands following the science around GCRs, and plans to further move discussion of scholarly GCR literature into the mainstream media. It is believed that public scholarship efforts like these can play important roles in societal responses to GCRs.

W3-A.3 14:10 Catastrophic Risk Forecasts From Refuge Entry Futures. Hanson RD*; George Mason University

Abstract: Speculative markets have demonstrated powerful abilities to forecast future events, which has inspired a new field of prediction markets to explore such possibilities. Can such power be harnessed to forecast global catastrophic risk? One problem is that such mechanisms offered weaker incentives to forecast distant future events, yet we want forecasts about distant future catastrophes. But this is a generic problem with all ways to forecast the distant future; it is not specific to this mechanism. Bets also have a problem forecasting the end of the world, as no one is left afterward to collect on bets. So to let speculators advise us about world’s end, we might have them trade an asset available now that remains valuable as close as possible to an end. Imagine a refuge with a good chance of surviving a wide range of disasters. It might be hidden deep in a mine, stocked with years of food and power, and continuously populated with thirty experts and thirty amateurs. Locked down against pandemics, it is opened every month for supplies and new residents. A refuge ticket gives you the right to use an amateur refuge slot for a given time period. To exercise a ticket, you show up at its entrance at the assigned time. Refuge tickets could be auctioned years in advance, broken into conditional parts, and traded in subsidized markets. For example, one might buy a refuge ticket valid on a certain date only in the event that USA and Russia had just broken off diplomatic relations, or in the event a city somewhere is nuked. The price of such resort tickets would rise with the chance of such events. By trading such tickets conditional on a policy that might mitigate a crisis, such as a treaty, prices could reflect conditional chances of such events.

Support the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence

The Singularity Institute needs your dedicated support to continue our research and educational work. In the last decade since our founding, the Singularity Institute has expanded from just a few people to a stable organization with almost a dozen staff and hundreds of supporters worldwide. We currently support four Research Fellows and five other full and part-time staff to participate in and organize the Singularity Summit, Visiting Fellows Program, outreach programs, and independent research. Singularity Institute supporters and collaborators can be found from England to Japan, Finland to Australia. Join our worldwide network in pursuit of a positive Singularity by contributing your time or money to our effort. Please get in touch with us if you have any questions or want to help.

Thank you for reading!