A bunch of us from Plaxo (Rikk, Joseph, Dan, and I) had the opportunity to attend the Singularity Summit over at Stanford this past Saturday, including a special reception afterwards at the Computer History Museum just down the road from us.
What’s the Singularity? There are different ways to describe it, but the subtitle from Ray Kurzweil’s book on the topic, The Singularity is Near, is “When Evolution Transcends Biology.” There were many speakers, representing a diversity of views. Some of the highlights for me included:
Seeing Kurzweil live. He wowed us with a demo of a product that I would describe as an intelligent camera for the blind. Point the camera at a page of text, and it reads it out loud. Let your hand stray a bit, and the camera tells you that it is not being pointed squarely at the page (and directs you to point it downward 30 degrees). And according to Ray: point it at a pet, and it can tell you whether it’s a cat or a dog. (With thanks to Google Image search for giving access to millions of dog and cat pictures to train the AI behind it to pattern match dog vs. cat.)
Douglas Hofstadter’s use of hand-drawn cartoons to illustrate his points. In contrast, during Nick Bostrom’s talk, which covered “existential risks” to humanity (including that our universe is just a computer simulation that might get turned off), I found myself wishing to add one more risk to his slides: “death by PowerPoint.” (Nick, not targeting you on that; just a general comment about lengthy, text-heavy slide decks.)
Sebastian Thrun’s presentation on Stanford’s win in the DARPA-funded robotic car race. He shared hilarious video clips of various mishaps, including, believe it or not, a robotic motorcycle that fell over within feet of the start.
Eric Drexler’s presentation on nano-manufacturing. He mentioned that M.I.T. has added the first new Course (department) in a very long time: Biological Engineering. I pay attention to that sort of stuff now – in part, because I failed to grasp the true importance of there being a “Materials Science” Course as part of the core curriculum back in the early ‘80’s.
And lastly, Bill McKibben’s haunting talk in favor of restraint. He offered that the two most important inventions of the 20th Century were wilderness preserves and non-violent protest. There was a strange irony to his talk, in that the only “anti-tech” speaker was presenting not in person, but via a cool videoconferencing technology that projected a life-size image of him onto a glass surface, behind a lectern. It really looked at times as if he were in the room with us. I found myself wondering if perhaps he were in fact an AI, and that we were witnessing a public Turing test!
Overall, it was a really interesting event. My congratulations and thanks to Tyler Emerson and the Singularity Institute for Articificial Intelligence for a great job organizing it (and thanks for inviting some of us from Plaxo to attend!).
There were also numerous references to Internet topics, like social networking and Google. And I got into a number of great conversations about how a “smart address book” can play a vital, even central role in our ever more digital, networked lives.
I was also at the summit, truely a history-making event in my opinion. While I went into the summit with a blind liking for the technological future (being a tech worker myself), I was really impressed by McKibben's wise words on restraint. I recently read his book titled "Enough" and I wouldn't exactly call him "anti-tech," but one who adopts technologies which are beneficial to society as a whole, not just to a particular group of humans or to a particular generation of humans.
Cheers.