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.

SIAI President Michael Vassar and SIAI Director of Research Ben Goertzel recently had short articles published in Forbes magazine’s online AI Report. Here is an excerpt from the beginning of Michael Vassar’s article:

Are you in a city? If so, may I ask you to look around? Almost everything you see was created deliberately. Human minds built theories and implemented plans. Due to these plans, rocks were gathered, shaped and rearranged. You call some of these rocks your house. The main things that weren’t created deliberately are the minds themselves.

Humans are primarily natural, not designed. Human culture shapes personal development, but on an absolute scale culture permits only a very narrow range of possibilities. A human can be raised to be an Inca, a teacher or a psychoanalyst. More careful upbringing and good luck can produce a Mozart, an Einstein or a Julius Caesar, but never a dolphin, a raven or an elephant. Michael Phelps is astounding for a human, but a dolphin can cross an Olympic pool in seconds.

Continue Michael’s article here, or read Ben’s article here.