My guest today is Nikola Danaylov (who also goes by the pseudonym Socrates), host of The Singularity 1 on 1 Podcast and SingularitySymposium.com and SingularityWEBLOG.com.

He was born in Bulgaria, but moved to Toronto in 1998 where he obtained degrees in Political Science, Philosophy and Economics. About 18 months ago he started the Singularity 1 on 1 podcast and since then has interviewed major big brains, from Kurzweil and Vinge to Wolfram and Stross.

You can hear No Illusions on Stitcher SmartRadio,  Stitcher allows you to listen to your favorite shows directly from your iPhone, Android Phone,  BlackBerry  or Palm phones

On-demand and on the go!

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I want one! Only $400,000. Would make a great companion to Rosie, our beloved Roomba.

Towel-folding robot now on general sale – tech – 14 September 2010 – New Scientist.

Iowa State University will take delivery is a partner with NCSA & IBM* in the development of Blue Waters – the world’s first supercomputer to be able to sustain 1 petaflop – in 2011. (source: FoxNews). IBM says Blue Waters will have a peak performance of 10 petaflops. (source: Wikipedia)

Blue Waters, an implementation of PERCS technology, is planned to be composed of:
- more than 25,000 eight-core POWER7 CPUs with 32MB on-die L3 cache running at 4.0 GHz (200,000 cores)
- more than 1 petabyte of main memory
- more than 10 petabytes of disk storage
- half an exabyte of archival storage
- up to 400 Gbit/s external (Internet) connectivity

Why is this important?

Well, according to Ray Kurzweil (listen to 2005 my interview with him here), the human brain probably has a computational level of 20 petaflops. (source: The Enlightened Blog)

And we all know that Moore’s Law says that theoretical computing speeds double every 2 years. That means we should have a supercomputer doing 20 petaflops by 2013.

Take THAT, stupid Mayans.

* The first draft of this post said Iowa State was “taking deliver” of Blue Waters. My thanks to Trish Barker from National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) for sending me an email pointing out that “while Iowa State is a partner on the project and scientists from Iowa State will use the supercomputer to do big science, the supercomputer will be here at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign”.

She also gave me these additional links:

Overview: http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/BlueWaters/
The hardware: http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/BlueWaters/system.html
The building: http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/AboutUs/Facilities/npcf.html

IEEE Spectrum has a series of new essays on the singularity from the likes of Vernor Vinge and Rodney Brooks (who have both been on this show in the last year).

My favourite quote so far comes from Vinge’s new essay “Signs of the Singularity“:

“The best answer to the question, “Will computers ever be as smart as humans?” is probably “Yes, but only briefly”.”

Hans Moravec has suggested that the human brain has a processing capacity of 10 quadrillion instructions per second (10 billion MIPS). In comparison, it was announced today that the fastest supercomputer in the world, called Roadrunner and devised and built by engineers and scientists at I.B.M. and Los Alamos National Laboratory, is capable of handling 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second.

In 2007, it was announced the previous fastest supercomputer, IBM’s Blue Gene /l, had been upgraded to achieve 478 TFLOPS sustained and 596 TFLOPS peak. So in less that 12 months, we’ve doubled (hey, I should create a law around that prediction).

So, if Moore’s Law holds out:

2009 – 2 QIPS

2010 – 4 QIPS

2011 – 8 QIPS

2012 – 16 QIPS – which puts it 6 QIPS above the suggested ability of a human brain.

Are you ready for that? Do you think the human race is ready for that?

We have NO IDEA what the consequences of that are. On one hand, it could be nothing. On the other hand, what if sentience is nothing more than massive computation?

Either way, here we are, a mere 4 years before a machine is likely to be built which will have a bigger brain than a human and we aren’t even discussing what that means for the human race.

Well, that’s not exactly true – Tyler’s Singularity Institute are discussing it, but where is the debate in mainstream media, in the government, in polite society?

It reminds me of a chat I had with Australian SF author Damien Broderick over dinner about ten years ago. I asked him when he thought these subjects would be discussed by the general populace. He replied “when it’s way too late to do anything about it”.

Via Simon Sharwood’s twitter, I just learned that Vernor Vinge’s “Rainbows End” has just won the coveted ‘Best Novel’ award at the Hugo Awards! A massive congratulations from all at TPN to Vernor. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend getting yourself a copy of RAINBOWS END. It is a brilliant imagining of what the net will probably look like in 2025.

Vinge was recently on G’Day World and I guess this is as good a time as any to give it another plug! Listen to my July 2007 interview with Vernor Vinge here.

Rodney Brooks is Panasonic Professor of Robotics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also Chief Technical Officer and sits on the Board of iRobot Corp. From July 1, 2003 until June 30, 2007, he was director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; prior to that, he was director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

He chatted with me this morning about my deep-seated obsession to have a humanoid robot and HAL-like AI.

Prof Brooks will be speaking at the Singularity Summit in California next month. Get your tickets here.

For more reading about the current state of robots:

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I’ve created a couple of groups inside Second Life. You can now add yourself to the following groups:

If I knew how to link directly to those groups from here, I would. But I don’t. So for now you just need to search for them in-world. Or you can add “Cameron Switchblade” to your friends and check out the groups I belong to.

If you’re a member of Facebook, you can ADD ME AS A FRIEND and then ADD YOURSELF TO THE G’DAY WORLD GROUP.

Add me to your Twitter account.

Do me a solid and digg the show.

Get the TPN version of Particls.

Don’t forget to make use of my new comments line – +613 9016 9699.

You can now buy transcripts of this podcast from Pods In Print.

If you enjoyed this podcast, make sure you don’t miss future episodes by subscribing to our feed and leave us a voice comment!

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The G’Day World Theme Song is “Save Me” by The Napoleon Blown Aparts.

Today I had the fortune to chat with another living legend – Vernor Vinge (pronounced “vin-jee” as in, he explained off air, “stingy”). While VV may not have the public profile of a William Gibson or Neal Stephenson, in geek circles no SF author carries more respect. Why is it so?

In 1981 Vernor wrote a novella called TRUE NAMES which was the one of the earliest stories to present a fully realized concept of cyberspace which he called the “Other Plane” and which people accessed by attaching electrodes to their scalp. Inside the Other Plane, people hid their “true names” from the Government by creating avatars with pseudonyms – sound familiar? This was several years before NEUROMANCER (William Gibson, 1984) or SNOW CRASH (Neal Stephenson, 1992) and is therefore a seminal work in cyberpunk fiction.

Vinge’s novels A FIRE UPON THE DEEP (1992) and A DEEPNESS IN THE SKY (1999) both won the Hugo Award for Best Novel. In 1993 he wrote an essay called “The Coming Technological Singularity” which popularized that term.

His latest novel, RAINBOWS END, is a masterpiece of near-future Sci-Fi which explores the world circa 2025. Marc Andreessen called it “the clearest and most plausible extrapolation of modern technology trends forward to the year 2025 that you can imagine.” It has been nominated for the 2007 Hugo Award for Best Novel.

You can learn more about the huge potential ramifications of the Singularity by attending the Singularity Summit 2007.

Become part of the G’Day World conversation.

I’ve created a couple of groups inside Second Life. You can now add yourself to the following groups:

If I knew how to link directly to those groups from here, I would. But I don’t. So for now you just need to search for them in-world. Or you can add “Cameron Switchblade” to your friends and check out the groups I belong to.

If you’re a member of Facebook, you can ADD ME AS A FRIEND and then ADD YOURSELF TO THE G’DAY WORLD GROUP.

Add me to your Twitter account.

Do me a solid and digg the show.

Get the TPN version of Particls.

Don’t forget to make use of my new comments line – +613 9016 9699.

You can now buy transcripts of this podcast from Pods In Print.

If you enjoyed this podcast, make sure you don’t miss future episodes by subscribing to our feed and leave us a voice comment!

• Subscribe to TPN::G’day World by Email
• If you use iTunes, click here.
• If you use another aggregator, grab our RSS feed here.
• If you don’t know what I’m talking about, read this description in Wikipedia.

The G’Day World Theme Song is “Save Me” by The Napoleon Blown Aparts.

Wendell Wallach is a lecturer and consultant at Yale University’s Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics where he chairs the working research group on Technology and Ethics, leads a seminar for bioethics interns, and functions as a senior coordinator for other working groups and projects. He has lectured worldwide, published many articles, and is presently writing two books. Cybersoul explores the ways in which cognitive science and the Information Age are altering our understanding of human decision-making and ethics. Machine Morality: From Aristotle to Asimov and Beyond, which Wendell is co-authoring and which will be published by MIT Press, explores the prospects for designing computer systems capable of making moral decisions. Wendell is recognized as one of the leaders in the new field of Machine Ethics, and designed the first course anywhere on this subject, which he has taught twice at Yale.

Wendell is one of the speakers at the upcoming Singularity Summit.

Become part of the G’Day World conversation.
If you’re a member of Facebook, you can ADD ME AS A FRIEND and then ADD YOURSELF TO THE G’DAY WORLD GROUP.
Add me to your Twitter account.
Do me a solid and digg the show.

Get the TPN version of Particls?

Don’t forget to make use of my new comments line – +613 9016 9699.

You can now buy transcripts of this podcast from Pods In Print.

If you enjoyed this podcast, make sure you don’t miss future episodes by subscribing to our feed and leave us a voice comment!

• Subscribe to TPN::G’day World by Email
• If you use iTunes, click here.
• If you use another aggregator, grab our RSS feed here.
• If you don’t know what I’m talking about, read this description in Wikipedia.

The G’Day World Theme Song is “Save Me” by The Napoleon Blown Aparts.

J. Storrs Hall is an independent scientist and author. His most recent book is Beyond AI: Creating the Conscience of the Machine, and he was the founding Chief Scientist of Nanorex, Inc, which is developing a CAD system for nanomechanical engineering, is currently a member of Nanorex’ Scientific Advisory Board, and is a Research Fellow of the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing. He is also known as the originator of the Utility Fog concept.

Become part of the G’Day World conversation.

If you’re a member of Facebook, you can ADD ME AS A FRIEND and then ADD YOURSELF TO THE G’DAY WORLD GROUP.

Add me to your Twitter account.

Do me a solid and digg the show.

Get the TPN version of Particls?

Don’t forget to make use of my new comments line – +613 9016 9699.

You can now buy transcripts of this podcast from Pods In Print.

If you enjoyed this podcast, make sure you don’t miss future episodes by subscribing to our feed and leave us a voice comment!

• Subscribe to TPN::G’day World by Email
• If you use iTunes, click here.
• If you use another aggregator, grab our RSS feed here.
• If you don’t know what I’m talking about, read this description in Wikipedia.

The G’Day World Theme Song is “Save Me” by The Napoleon Blown Aparts.

Jamais Cascio is a San Francisco Bay Area-based writer and ethical futurist. He chatted with me last week about the “Participatory panopticon“, Sousveillance, and why everyone should take “democratic transhumanism” very, very seriously. Read Jamais’ blog to find out more about his views on the preferred future. You can also catch Jamais at the Singularity Institute‘s conference in September 2007.

Become part of the G’Day World conversation.

If you’re a member of Facebook, you can ADD ME AS A FRIEND and then ADD YOURSELF TO THE G’DAY WORLD GROUP.

Do me a solid and digg the show.

Get the TPN version of Particls?

Don’t forget to make use of my new comments line – +613 9016 9699.

You can now buy transcripts of this podcast from Pods In Print.

If you enjoyed this podcast, make sure you don’t miss future episodes by subscribing to our feed and leave us a voice comment!

• Subscribe to TPN::G’day World by Email
• If you use iTunes, click here.
• If you use another aggregator, grab our RSS feed here.
• If you don’t know what I’m talking about, read this description in Wikipedia.

The G’Day World Theme Song is “Save Me” by The Napoleon Blown Aparts.

Steve Omohundro is a computer scientist and President of Self-Aware Systems in Palo Alto, California. Since April 2007 he is a research advisor to the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. We chatted this morning about his timeline and vision for the possible ways that artificial intelligence will emerge and how he believes self-aware machines will benefit humanity.

Steve is going to be another of the speakers at SIAI’s conference in September 2007.

Become part of the G’Day World conversation.

If you’re a member of Facebook, you can ADD ME AS A FRIEND and then ADD YOURSELF TO THE G’DAY WORLD GROUP.

Do me a solid and digg the show.

Get the TPN version of Particls?

Don’t forget to make use of my new comments line – +613 9016 9699.

You can now buy transcripts of this podcast from Pods In Print.

If you enjoyed this podcast, make sure you don’t miss future episodes by subscribing to our feed and leave us a voice comment!

• Subscribe to TPN::G’day World by Email
• If you use iTunes, click here.
• If you use another aggregator, grab our RSS feed here.
• If you don’t know what I’m talking about, read this description in Wikipedia.

The G’Day World Theme Song is “Save Me” by The Napoleon Blown Aparts.

Didn’t expect THAT, did you?

I’m prepping for my chat with Vint tomorrow morning and happened upon this recent interview with Kuzweil on CNNMoney where he says:

“These slides that Gore puts up are ludicrous,” says the man who once delivered a tech conference presentation as a singing computer avatar named Ramona. (That stunt was the inspiration for the 2002 Al Pacino movie “Simone.”) “They don’t account for anything like the technological progress we’re going to experience.”

I guess he means that accelerating technological progress will allow us to generate power using fossil-fuel substitutes and undo the damage we’ve already done. He might be right. I hope he is. I still don’t think that means we should stop doing what we can do now to change our behaviours though.

By the way… I’ve got something VERY exciting in the works for TPN’s audience regarding carbon offsets. Stay tuned.

The guys from the Singularity Institute are trying to get on the front page of Digg. Do me a favour and DIGG SIAI.

See also Eliezer’s new video interview.

******

Remember Stan Relihan from episode #219? The LinkedIn guy? Well I’m excited to announce that he’s starting his own show on TPN! You may recall I half-jokingly set Stan a goal at the end of the show to use LinkedIn to get me a good guest for the show. Well he’s the guy that set up my interview with Vint Cerf. So we both agreed he proved his point. We haven’t come up with a title for the show yet but it’s going to be around networking, using LinkedIn and Web2.0 tools but also how to network the old fashioned way. Strategies for getting the most out of your network. As networking is something I’ve never really been good at or comfortable with, I’m really excited about the show.

******

Michael Lemonick over on Time’s site has a good article on ID vs Evolution. There’s some fiery debate in his comments. Michael’s post on the recent “dark matter” images is also good. Helped me start to get my head around what I’m looking at.

******

Anyone know when GRINDHOUSE is opening here?? When I wrote this post on March 30th, according to YourMovies.com.au it was supposed to open on May 31st but it seems to have disappeared? I wonder if this has anything to do with the news that they are going to split the films up?

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OH MY ZEUS!! I just watched the most brilliant, amazing, mind-wrenchingly awesome film I have seen in eons – HARD CANDY. I’ve been hearing about this film since it hit the cinemas and most people told me “it’s hard to watch”. But I loved it. I haven’t been this excited about a film since… Fight Club. This is the best psychological thriller I have seen since DEATH & THE MAIDEN. I thought Ellen Page‘s performance was amazing. Although it’s pretty hard to pass her off as a 14 year old, even a “mature” 14 year old, she’s believable enough. But her performance was simply spellbinding. I can’t think of enough adjectives to describe this movie. If you haven’t seen it yet, get it out on DVD immediately. Do not pass GO, etc.

Forgive me Father – it’s been at least two weeks since my last podcast.

I figured you guys needed some time to digest my last run of shows. Ready for more yet?

Another show on the coming of the technological singularity today. My guest is Eliezer Yudkowsky, co-founder and research fellow at the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence in California.

I have been aware of Eli for ten years or more. He was featured fairly prominently in Damien Broderick’s book The Spike and was a contributor to Natasha Vita-More’s Extropian mailing list in the mid to late Nineties.

An autodidact prodigy, Eliezer wrote the first version of his Singularity “call to arms”, Staring Into The Singularity, at the age of 15 and has been re-working it continually since then.

On this episode I’ve tried to capture Eliezer’s vision for the different forms that the Singularity might take, the timelines for it, and his motivations for trying to make it happen as soon as possible.

I hope you enjoy it.

If you want to hear more interviews about The Singularity or AI, try these previous episodes of G’Day World:

Dr Aubrey de Grey
Ray Kurzweil
Roger Williams
Dr Ben Goertzel

Don’t forget to make use of my new comments line – +613 9016 9699.

If you enjoyed this podcast, make sure you don’t miss future episodes by subscribing to our feed and leave us a voice comment!

• Subscribe to TPN::G’day World by Email
• If you use iTunes, click here.
• If you use another aggregator, grab our RSS feed here.
• If you don’t know what I’m talking about, read this description in Wikipedia.

The G’Day World Theme Song is “Save Me” by The Napoleon Blown Aparts.
The “War Of The Worlds’ stuff at the beginning of the show comes from Chris Anderson’s POP!tech 2007 speech.

Tyler Emerson from the Singularity Institute emailed me tonight with some exciting news.

The Singularity Institute has released the videos from the Singularity Summit at Stanford, the day-long event we organized last year where Ray Kurzweil, Douglas Hofstadter, Cory Doctorow, and others engaged in extensive discussion about the singularity scenario.

Click here for the Videos

We also announced yesterday an online matching challenge, supported by PayPal Co-Founder and Former CEO Peter Thiel, to fund a long-term research program to develop safe, stable self-improving systems. Ray, who serves on our board, is involved. We also released a 10-minute video, featuring interviews with Barney Pell, Aubrey de Grey, Peter Thiel, and others.

Click here for the Challenge
Click here for the 10-Min Video

You may also find one of our recent publications relevant to your interests, “Artificial Intelligence as a Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk”, forthcoming from Oxford University Press in an edited volume on global catastrophic risks.

Click here for the Publication

As I said on the recent interview with Ben Goertzel, it’s terrific to see Peter Thiel investing some of his PayPal money into areas such as life extension research and singularity research. That’s certainly one area I’d be sinking my money… if I had any left to sink.

My game plan has always been to get myself into singularity research and development. AI, life extension, nano-tech, etc. I’ve got a poster up on the wall of my office. It’s my own little mission statement, my thirty-year plan.

Step 1 – Control of the media by 2015. Unless you control the media, you can’t have any significant impact on the political process.
Step 2 – Control of the political process by 2025. Unless you control the political process, you can’t get anything done fast enough.
Step 3 – Use the media and politics to get people ready for The Singularity by 2035.

My guest on this episode is Dr Benjamin Goertzel Ph.D, CEO and CSO of Novamente LLC, a privately held AI software company.

He explains Novamente’s approach to AGI (artificial general intelligence) and their plans to release some of their early products into the Second Life universe. We also talk about:

1. the history and challenges of AI research
2. his investment in Aubrey de Grey’s Methuselah Foundation
3. the recent news about IBM’s Blue Gene/L simulating half a mouse brain
4. Damien Broderick
5. Roger Williams
6. Ray Kurzweil

and much more.

Don’t forget to make use of my new comments line – +613 9016 9699.

If you enjoyed this podcast, make sure you don’t miss future episodes by subscribing to our feed and leave us a voice comment!

• Subscribe to TPN::G’day World by Email
• If you use iTunes, click here.
• If you use another aggregator, grab our RSS feed here.
• If you don’t know what I’m talking about, read this description in Wikipedia.

The G’Day World Theme Song is “Save Me” by The Napoleon Blown Aparts.