Mary, Platt, John and Ian, I already talked a bit with Matt. [Mary] What I hope is that you just happened to not mention a parallel conference going on in the next room where presenters were discussing better systems of community.
[Krimel] Why would you assume this topic was not on the agenda? Sustainability, vertical farming, social networking, bioethics, communities that transcend geography, elimination of suffering, enhancements of human life and lifestyle were both text and subtext of most of the presentations. As a concert example one presenter talked about his website that assists volunteers in adding subtitles to videos so that people for any language community can gain knowledge that is almost exclusive to the west at present. As I recall the title of his talk was something like the Tower of Babel Must Fall. [Platt] Where are the seminars about the morality of these supposed "transformations? [Krimel] Again this was covered extensively. I suspect most of the participants and presenters were aware or practitioners of Eastern thinking. One dude talked exclusively about the damaging impact of a stressful materialistic lifestyle and advocated a kind of Human Operating System 2.0 that included meditation, relaxation, focusing on the pre-intellectual present and the therapeutic effects of aerobic exercise. Both he and another presenter invited the audience to participate in brief demonstrations of guided imagery. Other presenters looked at the political resistance to progress that arise of conservatism and fear. [Platt] Sounds to me like a bunch of science types looking for government handouts. [Krimel] It would only sound like that if you weren't listening or even glancing at the program schedule. Kurzweil is primarily an inventor who developed one of the first scanners, the first realistic sound music synthesizer and software for both text and speech recognition. In fact his interest in Moore's Law arose from his attempt to try to find a model for predicting the timing of development and acceptance of his inventions. Wolfram's interests and resources to pursue them grew out of his development of Mathmatica software. He is entirely self funded and his search engine Wolfram Alpha is another of his entrepreneurial projects. Neil Bushnell has founded something like nine successful companies beginning with Atari in the 1970's. He developed the first consult computer gaming system Pong and later founded Chuckie Cheese among other things. That is just three obvious examples but probably 70% of the presenters were founders and CEO of companies. One woman started a company that combines the idea of Zipcars and eBay. Instead of her company placing cars around urban areas she has car owners sign-up to allow others to borrow them for a fee. Her company then matches people who need cars for short periods with people who aren't using theirs. Another guy set up a technical design shop with machinery for laser die cutting, machining parts and other fabrication tools to enable prospective inventors to develop their own product ideas or art projects. It was all about citizens conducting their own research or assisting as volunteers in the research of others. There are many more examples but they are just too numerous to mention. Anyone who looked at the website for the conference should have noted that it's title was "The Rise of the Citizen Scientist." There were two notable mentions of the government's role in scientific research. One was from an ethicist who consults with the military. He pointed out that the military invests heavily in research on human enhancement, robotics and AI. Among other things he discussed the ethical and social challenges posed by 'enhanced' soldiers reintegrating into 'normal' society. There were numerous oblique references to the conservative assault on the academy, the Bush administration war of science, and the corporatization of the universities. Among the most overt was an MIT researcher who works on quantum computing. He talked about the presence of quantum effect in photosynthesis and about a project he headed that was able to send a photon backwards in time with the intent to annihilate itself. He point out the logical inconsistency of the government abandoning efforts at pure research in favor of practical research. As he noted if research can have practical impact it is likely to be funded by private interests as it should be. Pure research on the other hand isn't funded privately because it isn't aimed at practical functionality so much as at the expansion of human knowledge. Since almost all practical research is derived from pure research it seems like a waste of taxpayer money to starve the later while feeding the former. [John] I don't believe a self-referential system can accurately predict where its going, however and I especially find the assertion of the conquering of the Turing test laughable. [Krimel] A self referential, reflective, iterative system is required to access past experience so that it can impact present behavior to effect change in the future. But it also requires sufficient processing capability to reflect on, for example what one is saying. Not all humans can achieve this apparently. As for the Turing test, Kurzweil has a bet with Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus that it will happen by 2039 so we will see who laughs last. [Ian] Explain the "Goertzel sent an emissary to the MoQ" remark? [Krimel] Try searching Goertzel on the Moq.org site. [Ian] I think I made my view on the "singularity" clear already ... AGI needs to evolve through life and social before it reaches intellectual, so this is much more than just processing power. [Krimel] You have mentioned it before and it made no sense then either. Assuming such a thing is on the horizon, its passage through the life and social has already been made through us as its programmers. The most promising areas in this field do seem to involve neural networks as arrays of pattern recognizers. This does mimic life like systems both in structure and function and as it is emerging from the activities of living beings. It is not like you don't have a point; it just seems like a point without a point. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
