Every year, computers surpass human abilities in new ways. In 1997, IBM’s “Deep Blue” computer beat the World Champion of chess, and earlier this year IBM’s “Watson” computer beat the best human players at Jeopardy!. Recently, a robot named “Adam” was programmed with our scientific knowledge about yeast, then posed its own hypotheses, tested them, assessed the results, and made original scientific discoveries. This year, a machine surpassed human skill in recognizing traffic signs — an advance with implications for the debate over the safety of self-driving cars.

What happens when our machines surpass human ability in all things? The Pixar film Wall-E imagines an outer-space city staffed by robots who maintain the city, keep things clean, and hand over fresh food to increasingly obese humans relaxing in flying armchairs.

But the true potential of benevolent smarter-than-human machines — so called “Friendly AI” — is much greater than this. Friendly AI could mean the end of cancer. The end of starvation. The end of war. Even the end of death.

But building Friendly AI will not be easy. Isaac Asimov used science fiction stories — some of them combined for the Will Smith movie I, Robot — to show why a simple set of rules like “Don’t harm humans” won’t be sufficient to make AI friendly.

Eliezer Yudkowsky has been studying the challenges of Friendly AI for more than a decade. His talk for the 2011 Singularity Summit, “Open Problems in Friendly Artificial Intelligence,” will show how the research program of Friendly AI breaks down into technical sub-problems that can be addressed by today’s researchers.

Earlier this year, Ken Jennings competed against an IBM computer called “Watson” on a special edition of Jeopardy! Watson clearly represents a huge advance in the field of question-answering technology, and one with the possibility to change industries from health care to law enforcement to tech support. Meanwhile, no shortage of “HAL” and “Terminator” jokes came from all sides. Jennings understood that sentiment, but also came to a grudging respect for Watson’s skill in an arena long thought beyond the reach of computers. Jennings will discuss the implications of AI’s progress for human society.

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I first encountered Christof Koch’s work in 2005. I discovered and watched his online lecture series on the neural correlates of consciousness. His detailed explanations showed me in concrete ways how the mind is a machine, an insight that later enabled me to understand Singularitarian ideas like the intelligence explosion. You might even say that Christof was a significant cause of my current position as Director of Development at Singularity Institute, where I’m working with several others to set up the 2011 Singularity Summit!

As impressed as I was with Christof’s lectures back in 2005, I also admired what a well-rounded, passionate life he led outside of his research. Who else has a low Erdos number, gets a tattoo as an adult, rock climbs, and runs marathons. Christof’s active life-style combined with a life of scholarship has always been inspiring to me… so much so, that within months of learning about him, I signed up for and trained to run my own first marathon back in 2006… even while I was still a graduate student. In short, don’t start learning about Christof Koch unless you’re prepared to like and admire one of the best thinkers of our time!

At the upcoming Summit, Christof will provide an up-to-date summary of the neurobiology of consciousness. I’m looking forward to having one of the world’s top lecturers knock down our naive theories of the mind, one-by-one, and explain the experiments that could one day answer the unsolved questions of human consciousness. Those of us at the Singularity Summit won’t want to miss this talk!

In his 2005 bestseller The Singularity is Near, inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil used a variety of models to predict future trends in technology. Ray has seen some success with this in the past, having predicted in 1990 that machines would beat the world’s best human chess player by 1998, a prediction fulfilled when IBM’s Deep Blue defeated chess World Champion Garry Kasparov. His predictions appeared in TIME magazine with the cover article 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal.

At the upcoming 2011 Singularity Summit, Ray will use his latest prediction models for future technologies to discuss mind and machine and how they will merge together.

Publisher, columnist, and author Michael Shermer will speak at the 2011 Singularity Summit about a Social Singularity — transitioning society from a tribalistic civilization to a more mature one. This will require new science, new technologies, and new economic and political systems.

I personally look forward to Michael’s talk because he has influenced me greatly. I was raised to believe that wonder and morality is only possible if the world is supernatural, and Michael was one of the major authors that showed me — in both his writings and his life  — that beauty and goodness exist in nature in abundance.

At the upcoming 2011 Singularity Summit, TV host and producer Jason Silva will discuss the importance of using art and design to communicate technological and philosophical visions of the Singularity. We are story-making creatures, and important ideas need imaginative representations to resonate with people. Singularity-informed thinking calls for a new story to be told.

At the upcoming Singularity Summit, economist Tyler Cowen will discuss his new book The Great Stagnation. Ryan Avent at The Economist writes:

Cowen’s book… will have a profound impact on the way people think about the last thirty years.

His book explores the causes of our past prosperity and how we will create it again:

America has been through the biggest financial crisis since the great Depression, unemployment numbers are frightening, media wages have been flat since the 1970s, and it is common to expect that things will get worse before they get better. Certainly, the multidecade stagnation is not yet over. How will we get out of this mess? One political party tries to increase government spending even when we have no good plan for paying for ballooning programs like Medicare and Social Security. The other party seems to think tax cuts will raise revenue and has a record of creating bigger fiscal disasters that the first. Where does this madness come from?

As Cowen argues, our economy has enjoyed low-hanging fruit since the seventeenth century: free land, immigrant labor, and powerful new technologies. But during the last forty years, the low-hanging fruit started disappearing, and we started pretending it was still there. We have failed to recognize that we are at a technological plateau. The fruit trees are barer than we want to believe. That’s it. That is what has gone wrong and that is why our politics is crazy.

After his talk, Cowen will debate Singularity Institute president Michael Vassar about the contents of the book.

You can register for the Oct. 15-16 summit here.