The videos for Singularity Summit 2009 are now available at Vimeo.

The Singularity Summit and Magnify.net have launched the Singularity Summit media page, which includes a collection of videos from the Singularity Institute, videos we find interesting from the web, aggregated tweets, pictures and more. The page will be in full effect during the summit, allowing users to upload videos and photos, watch video from the event and see a live twitter stream. Be sure to upload your videos, photos and tweets with the tag SS09.

If you plan on attending the Singularity Summit 2009, please register at https://www.singularitysummit.com/registration/ by midnight Eastern (9 PM California time) on October 2nd, this coming Friday. In the event that the Summit is not sold out, tickets will be sold at the door on the morning of October 3rd.

Stephen Wolfram, the British polymath known as the creator of Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha, and the author of the best-selling complexity theory book A New Kind of Science, will be attending the Singularity Summit this weekend. His bio can be found under the Singularity Summit program page. Mr. Wolfram will be giving a talk on the Singularity with Gregory Benford at 3 PM on Saturday, just before David Chalmers’ presentation on simulated worlds.

Dr. Aubrey de Grey, Chief Science Officer of the SENS Foundation, recently published the 8-page paper “The singularity and the Methuselarity: similarities and differences” which will appear in Strategy for the Future of Health (Bushko R, ed) later this year.  The paper, which looks at the similarities and differences between the Singularity and what Dr. de Grey calls the “Methuselarity”, when biomedical technology reaches actuarial escape velocity and therapies are available to rejuvenate the human body faster than it ages.  The paper is a preview of what Dr. de Grey will be speaking on at the upcoming Summit.

Credit goes to David Orban.  Itamar Arel will be speaking on Artificial Intelligence at the Summit.

Ed Boyden, who leads the Synthetic Neurobiology Group at MIT, will be speaking at the upcoming Singuarity Summit. He recently published the article “The Singularity and the Fixed Point” on the website of Technology Review, MIT’s magazine, which looks into the challenge of giving Artificial Intelligence proper motivations, or motivations at all. Here is an excerpt:

Some futurists such as Ray Kurzweil have hypothesized that we will someday soon pass through a singularity–that is, a time period of rapid technological change beyond which we cannot envision the future of society. Most visions of this singularity focus on the creation of machines intelligent enough to devise machines even more intelligent than themselves, and so forth recursively, thus launching a positive feedback loop of intelligence amplification. It’s an intriguing thought. (One of the first things I wanted to do when I got to MIT as an undergraduate was to build a robot scientist that could make discoveries faster and better than anyone else.) Even the CTO of Intel, Justin Rattner, has publicly speculated recently that we’re well on our way to this singularity, and conferences like the Singularity Summit (at which I’ll be speaking in October) are exploring how such transformations might take place.

Read the rest here.

The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence is co-sponsoring a program on ending aging with gerontology researcher Aubrey de Grey and the New York Academy of Sciences, on the evening of Tuesday, September 22nd in New York City.

The End of Aging: An Evening with Aubrey de Grey
September 22, 2009 | 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM
At the New York Academy of Sciences

Could it be possible for humans to live hundreds of years in the very near future? Is aging a curable disease? Iconoclast Aubrey de Grey predicts it’s only a matter of decades before regenerative medicine extends human life expectancy indefinitely. This event is one of five events in the 2009 Provocative Thinkers Series presented by Science & the City, a program of the New York Academy of Sciences. Co-sponsored by the Singularity Institute.

http://www.nyas.org/endofaging

If you plan to attend the Summit, you can connect with other attendees at our Facebook event.

Conference organizers have extended the early registration deadline for the Singularity Summit from August 10th to August 20th. Register in the next 12 days for a ticket fee of $399 instead of $498. You can lower your registration costs further by mentioning the event in your blog or Twitter ($25 off), putting up a banner ad on your blog for the event ($50 off), or referring people (20% off per non-student referral).  The early registration discount is automatic.  For the referral discount, you must contact us for a coupon, and for the Twitter and blog discounts, you can let us know and get reimbursed by Paypal after registration.

Students receive a 20% discount.  There is also a forum to connect for ride and room sharing.  All discounts are stackable.  To obtain the student discount, all you need to do is click the student check-box and send us a copy of your student ID.

The Summit will feature 27 excellent speakers, including Ray Kurzweil, David Chalmers, Peter Thiel, Aubrey de Grey, and AI specialists like Ben Goertzel, Marcus Hutter, and Juergen Schmidhuber.  David Chalmers will be there talking about uploading, a rare occurrence.  Many speaker abstracts can be accessed by clicking the links to the  individual speakers on the program page.

See you in New York!