Singularity Summit Recap
This weekend I went with CC to Singularity Summit in San Diego. The Singularity, if you’re unfamiliar with it, is the idea that technology is increasing at an exponential rate and that the human race will use it to speed up evolution to either alter itself or create a new intelligence greater than itself. Whether or not you buy the Singularity completely, I think it’s a good idea to get used to the fact that in our lifetimes we’re going to see technological changes that we cannot predict and that will probably affect many of our core beliefs about what it means to be concious / human.Some of the areas of science discussed at the summit were artificial intelligence, nano technology, biological engineering, life extension, and space exploration, to name a few. Notes on some of the cooler things I learned about:
Ocean Iron Fertilization - a company called Climos is dumping iron into the ocean, which spurs bacteria / plankton growth and helps decrease CO2 levels.
Nanotech - it’s hard, but expect to see nanobots in ~20 years. Possible use cases—doing jobs inside our bodies currently performed by bacteria, killing cancer cells.
Robotics - DARPA Grand Challenge has accelerated vehicle automation progress massively. Technologically, it cars that drive themselves may be possible in less than 10 years. Social / infrastructure challenges may be more of a barrier to adoption than tech.
Genetics - cost of sequencing DNA has exponentially decreased and you can now get a pretty cheap map of your genome from 23andme.com . Esther Dyson notes the difference between your genome and what you do with it, mentioning another project focusing on the latter called the Personal Genome Project. Within 5 years expect doctors to be considering your genetic sequence when diagnosing health problems and prescribing treatments. This was one of the things I was kind of surprised was so close on the horizon.
Claytronics - Intel CTO discussed some amazing work with tiny sized machines that can assemble into larger objects progrmattically. Sounded awesome and was something I had never seen before.
Digital Fabrication - Fab Lab - Study in automatata and protein assembly leading to new techniques of fabrication and manufacturing. So far, print, music, video have been digitized—physical objects are next. Ideas is to be able to download software that, when run, assemples itself into a physical object. This was probably the coolest thing I saw this weekend.
AI - IBM Blue Gene is trying to model the human brain, also, Open Cog doing cool stuff. Tried to get a feel for how these compare to Numenta, but need to read more about them. MIT is doing some really interesting stuff in teaching emotional responses to machines. Very cool stuff.
Advertising - automation will increase to the point where virtual assistants complete tasks for us like scheduling, booking flights, making day to day purchases. Ads will be targeted at virtual assistants, rather than at us.
I defintely got to learn a few things this weekend and got the chance to meet and debate with some intersting people, but no game changing consequences have resulted.
Actionable results?
* Need to checkout thoughtware.tv and podcast by sea steading guys
* Finish reading “Singularity is Near”
* Thinking about getting DNA sequenced by 23andme.com
* Have some new twitter friends
* Good opportunity for social software surrounding conferences - deserves thought
