[FRIAM] FYI: "Singularity Summit" @ Stanford

[steve smith]

On Apr 18, 2006, at 10:51 AM, Tom Johnson wrote:

>
>  :: Stanford Summit to Explore Coming Era of 'Superintelligence'
>
>  Stanford University futurists are organizing a conference next month 
> to explore "Singularity," an era of theoretical human 
> superintelligence created as the rate of technology change accelerates 
> over the coming decades.
>
>  The theory has been embraced by Ray Kurzweil, the noted inventor of 
> omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech 
> reading machine for the blind, and the text-to-speech synthesizer. 
> "Based on models of technology development that I've used to forecast 
> technological change successfully for more than 25 years, I believe.by 
> the 2040s our civilization will be billions of times more 
> intelligent," Kurzweil said.
Coincidentally (or not), I was at the Iowa State Virtual Reality 
Applications Center a few weeks ago (about the time Tom sent this out) 
and Kurzweil was speaking (and signing his new book - "The Singularity 
is Near").   I happened to have heard him speak when his "Age of 
Spiritual Machines" came out as well.

  I'm a long time fan of Kurzweil's technical work and have plenty of 
opinions about the "singularity" thing, with other's work informing me 
more deeply than his, but never as broadly.

I was surprised that this announcement didn't bring out more 
conversation here... this seems like a likely group of potential 
"Singularians".

- Steve