Here is a quote from the Chalmers paper that I linked yesterday:

One might think that the singularity would be of great interest to academic philosophers, cognitive scientists, and artificial intelligence researchers. In practice, this has not been the case. Good was an eminent academic, but his article was largely unappreciated at the time. The subsequent discussion of the singularity has largely taken place in nonacademic circles, including Internet forums, popular media and books, and workshops organized by the independent Singularity Institute. Perhaps the highly speculative flavor of the singularity idea has been responsible for academic resistance to the idea.

I think this resistance is a shame, as the singularity idea is clearly an important one. The argument for a singularity is one that we should take seriously. And the questions surrounding the singularity are of enormous practical and philosophical concern.

Practically: If there is a singularity, it will be one of the most important events in the history of the planet. An intelligence explosion has enormous potential benefits: a cure for all known diseases, an end to poverty, extraordinary scientific advances, and much more. It also has enormous potential dangers: an end to the human race, an arms race of warring machines, the power to destroy the planet. So if there is even a small chance that there will be a singularity, we would do well to think about what forms it might take and whether there is anything we can do to influence the outcomes in a positive direction.

Great advice for everyone living in the 21st century!

Recently, David Chalmers announced that he was posting a new paper based on his Singularity Summit 2010 talk: “The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis”. In his announcement, Chalmers notes, “I’m still an amateur on these topics and any feedback would be appreciated.” You can also watch a video of Chalmers’ Summit talk.

Here’s a paper presented at the 2009 Asia-Pacific Conference on Computing and Philosophy by participants in SIAI’s 2009 Visiting Fellows Program that is making the rounds. The point of the paper, which was written by Carl Shulman, Nick Tarleton, and Henrik Jonsson, is that consequentialism as commonly discussed has a number of “free variables” where intuitions disagree about the right values of these variables. Therefore, machine ethics should draw on the emerging field of moral psychology to figure out how to fill in these free variables. This point is plainly put in the title of one of the last sections, “Current moral theories are inadequate for machine ethics”.

A reply from UK philosopher David Pearce has recently been posted by Roko Mijic at Less Wrong.

Check out my blog post, “Hungry Optimizers with Low-Complexity Values” at Accelerating Future.

Ed Boyden, who leads the Synthetic Neurobiology Group at MIT, is concerned about the Singularity, and will be speaking at our upcoming Singularity Summit conference in New York. He recently published the article “The Singularity and the Fixed Point” on the website of Technology Review, MIT’s magazine, which looks into the challenge of giving Artificial Intelligence proper motivations. Making theoretical progress on the question of, “how do we give Artificial Intelligence proper motivations, such that we can trust those motivations even if the AI becomes smarter and more powerful than humans?” is a primary reason for SIAI’s existence.

A Call of Papers has been issued for a track on “Technological Singularity and Acceleration Studies,” at the 7th European conference on Computing And Philosophy?ECAP 2009, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2-4 July 2009.

Historical analysis of a broad range of paradigm shifts in science, biology, history, and technology–in particular in computing technology–suggests an accelerating rate of progress. This observation has led the attempted unification of the predictive power of biological evolution, cultural evolution, and technological evolution under a “Law of Accelerating Returns.” As a consequence, John von Neumann forecasted the arrival of an ?essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs as we know them could not continue.? This notion of Singularity coincides in time and nature with Alan Turing (1950) and Stephen Hawking’s (1998) expectation of machines that exhibit intelligence on par with an average human by 2050. John Irving Good (1965) and Vernor Vinge (1993) expect it to take the form of an ‘intelligence explosion’: the process by which ultraintelligent machines design ever more intelligent machines. Transhumanists suggest a parallel process of explosive progress in human intelligence. Unfortunately, the very term ?Singularity? also suggests the presence of an ?event horizon,? an epistemological barrier on our ability to understand the events that may follow it.

We invite abstracts examining the following issues from a philosophical, computational, mathematical, and scientific points of view:

1. Empirical assessments of the Law of Accelerating Returns
2. Estimating the reliability of a technological forecasts
3. Historical analysis of the Law of Accelerating Returns
4. The impact of acceleration on science and society by 2050
5. Hazards of technological acceleration and preventative measures
6. The nature of the Technological Singularity
7. The nature of an intelligence explosion
8. Beyond the ?event horizon? of the Technological Singularity

Papers submitted to the Technological Singularity and Acceleration Studies track in ECAP 2009 will also be considered for publication in a special issue of Technological Forecasting and Social Change (Elsevier).

Received from the track chair, Amnon H. Eden, School of Computer Science & Electronic Engineering, University of Essex, UK and Center For Inquiry, Amherst NY.