Singularity Summit 2008

[Cramulus]

found this on Cliff Pickover's Reality Carnival

http://singularityhub.com/2008/11/02/singularity-summit-2008-reviewed/



Singularity Summit 2008 Reviewed
November 2, 2008 – 8:12 pm

Singularity Hub is proud to deliver the web’s most comprehensive coverage and analysis of the Singularity Summit 2008.  The Singularity Summit is the premier annual event for those that are interested in the singularity.  Below you will find our high level summary, followed by a link to a much more detailed description with pictures.

On Saturday October 25, 2008 I attended the Singularity Summit at the Montgomery Theatre in San Jose, CA.    An impressive lineup of speakers, including Ray Kurzweil (de facto singularity advocate), Peter Diamandis (Founder/Chairman of Xprize Foundation), Vernor Vinge (famous science fiction author), and Justin Rattner (CTO of Intel) were on showcase for the roughly 500 attendees.  The summit was thought provoking, inspiring, and overall a success.

The summit began promptly at 9:00am and continued throughout the day until 6:00pm with a few breaks in between and a one and a half hour lunch break.  Here are the Hub’s major takeaways from the event:

1.  When people become believers in a near term singularity (a singularity that may come in their lifetimes) they radically change their behavior in terms of risk tolerance, eating habits, and investment horizon.   If large numbers of people begin to believe in a near term singularity this poses the possibility of enormous and potentially dangerous upheavals for society.

2.  Even if a true singularity is not reached within our lifetimes the singularity summit reinforces the vision that tremendous technological change beyond our imagining is coming in the next 40 years.  In the next 5 years an explosion in interest about the singularity and the pace of accelerating technology may occur.

3.  According to Ray Kurzweil, solar energy is an information technology that is experiencing exponential growth.  Solar energy production has doubled every year for the last 20 years and is now only 8 doublings away (that is about 10 years!) from providing nearly all of the world’s energy needs.  The implications of this trend are huge and warrant careful consideration for the environment, investment, politics, etc.

4.  Peter Diamandis announced that the Singularity University (SU) will be launched in the near future.  The Hub’s Keith Kleiner will be a founding member of SU and we will have much more to say about SU soon!

5.  According to Intel CTO Justin Rattner Intel has a solid roadmap that will ensure that Moore’s law will continue for at least another 10 years, by which time computers will be at least 1,000 times more powerful than today’s computers

6.  Virtual worlds will continue to gain traction and functionality as people continue to recognize and leverage the unique advantages that these worlds offer versus the physical world.

7.  Computers may be able to beat humans at chess and air hockey, but they are still a long way off from emulating human emotion and social behavior.  Demonstrations today of the cutting edge in computer emulation of emotion and social ability were downright pitiful.  Of course it is possible that we will make big leaps in the coming years, but today’s demonstrations were not encouraging.