Adam Ford, who invited me to speak at last year’s Singularity Summit in Melbourne, is also organising this year’s H+ Summit in Melbourne, June 25 – 26. He asked me to post some info about it:

The H+ Summit @ Melbourne brings together an eclectic mix of rationalists, futurists, science fiction writers, AI experts, scientists, biotechnology experts, philosophers and theorists to pursue deep philosophical, scientific and technological inquiry, with the aim of being able to discern those changes which are likely to have profound impacts and those which are merely transient and or fashionable.

Technological innovation permeates all aspects of society — from tiny water purification packets and 3d printers, to GPS tracking devices, wearable smart devices, decision support systems, replaceable body parts and personal genome tests. Because technology and society evolve together, it has become increasingly important to develop a greater understanding of how technology is shaping the course of our lives. We are faced with the challenge to continuously become innovative in harnessing and controlling technological development as it accelerates on many diverse fronts. The “pioneers of the future” are faced with the necessity to become ever more resourceful. Even the most conservative thinkers agree that we have already stepped into an era of a profound change. The good news is that our human diversity continues to spawn both inventiveness and novelty.

This conference is brought to you by Humanity+ @ Melbourne (Victoria, Australia). Humanity+ explores how society might use and profit from a variety of creative and innovative thought. Join us for this adventurous journey into the future where you can make a difference! This conference will challenge and enhance your view of the future.

Seating is limited, so Secure your tickets now! >>

www.humanityplus.org.au

Partial list of Speakers and subjects:

• Sean McMullen – “Doing It Now” - (As of writing, a Hugo Nominee for short story)
• Hugo de Garis – Nanotech, Femtotech – Lots of room at the bottom, | Quantum Topological Computing – Much More than Moore’s Law
• Meredith Doig – “Rationalism, Transhumanism & the Singuarlity” – (President of the Rationalist Society Australia)
• Colin Kline – “Logics - Boonlean (Pascalian) logic, Fuzzy Logic and Bayes” – Academic
• Greg Adamson – “Technology and social control“ – (Chairman of the Society for Social Implications of Technology IEEE)
• Binh Nguyen – “Evolutionary AI” – (PHD)
• Lev Lafayette – “More Human Than Human: The Computation of Moral Reasoning” – Philosopher
• Slade Beard – “Architecting the Future” (Complex Systems) - (IEEE)
• Avatar Polymorph – “The ethics of boosting animals from sentience to self-aware consciousness”
• Tony Smith – “The Plurality: Why everyting is all over the place” – (Chaos, Complex Systems)
• Jon Oxer – “The Maker Revolution”
• Andy Gelme – “The Internet of Things”
• Jeremy Nagel – “Open Source Biotech”

Unfortunately I can’t make it due to Perdomo Lounge responsibilities, otherwise I’d be there with bells on.

According to InventorsSpot.com – it’s called “A Twinkle in the Eye” and these lenses have been fabricated with an LED, a small radio chip and an antenna.The unit is powered wirelessly by the RF electrical signal and represents the start of research that could eventually lead to screens mounted onto contact lenses inside your eyes.

This reminds me of Vernor Vinge’s novel, RAINBOWS END which was set about 20 years into the future when everyone wore contact lenses that had the net and all sorts of augmented reality overlays. I did an interview with Vinge about it which you can listen to here. Sign me up for this shit NOW.

This reminds me of Vernor Vinge’s novel, RAINBOWS END which was set about 20 years into the future when everyone wore contact lenses that had the net and all sorts of augmented reality overlays. I did an interview with Vinge about it which you can listen to here. Sign me up for this shit NOW.

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”.

In #323 I welcome back a previous G’Day World guest, one of my favourite scientists, Dr Aubrey de Grey.

Aubrey is the founder of The Methuselah Foundation, a non-profit 501c(3) organization committed to the acceleration of progress toward a cure for age-related disease, disability, suffering, and death.

They are running a special conference on aging at UCLA from June 27 – 29 and the Friday night session, with three hours of speeches from leaders in the field, is FREE. Book tickets here.

If you want to learn more about SENS, here’s a link to the show I did with Aubrey back in August 2005:
G’Day World #42 – Aubrey de Grey

The music on today’s show is “1,000,000″ from the new Nine Inch Nails album “THE SLIP“, which is licensed under a creative commons attribution non-commercial share alike license.

NIN encourage you to
remix it
share it with your friends,
post it on your blog,
play it on your podcast,
give it to strangers,
etc..

ROCK ON TRENT REZNOR!

Aubrey de Grey was a guest on G’Day World #42 and recently he was also on The Colbert Report. I love his line “aging is a major cause of death… but it’s not the ONLY cause.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

As some of you may know, I’m a transhumanist. So I always enjoy hearing stories in the mainstream media discussing transhumanist aspirations. Recently, the ABC’s “All In The Mind” show covered transhumanism with a lecture from Leda Cosmides, Professor of Psychology, University of California, Santa Barbara. Worth a listen. Link here.

More info on Transhumanism here.