Hive45+ Podcast 3/4 - Singularity Summit Australia
Channel: hive45com
Date: 2010-09-30

HIVE45 PLUS+ episode featuring Nathan Waters, Geoffrey Pidcock and Tristan Grace for the week ending the 19/09/10 - wrapping-up our thoughts on the recent, inaugural Singularity Summit in Melbourne Australia.

This episode can be found at: http://hive45.com/plus/19-09-10-singularity-summit-australia/

The presentations we discuss:

* Robert Sparrow - "A Not-So-New Eugenics: The Harsh Logic Of Human Enhancement"

-- Liberal eugenics, Julian Savulescu, human enhancement via non-coercive market pressure, genetic modification, what defines "best", the criminal gene, picking the best genes for your children, the moral imperative is to upgrade and enhance, where do you define harm.

* Hugo de Garis - "AI -- An Artilect war or a Technological Utopia? "

-- The Artilect War (Artificial Intelligences) - the coming war between the Cosmists (those for building artilects) and the Terrans (those against), bigger than the war over capital ownership (communism vs capitalism), building intelligence orders of magnitude greater than our own - 10^24, becoming a cyborg, "Singularity" in the lexicon, robotics industry, quantum computers, Ed Witten, topological quantum computing, gigadeath - one billion deaths, Moore's Law is a historical generalization.

* Cameron Reilly - "The Singularity & Social Media"

-- A call to arms, teaching the public about the Singularity and exponential technological progress, grass-roots movement helps prevent subversion, exponential growth is important, we need a new term for "Singularitarian".

* Kevin B. Korb - "The Ethics of AI"

-- Ethical AI can be created, utilitarian AI, BDI agents (Belief-Desire-Intentions), "AI in 100s of years", AI from collective intelligence, philosophy of AI, building artificial intelligence with human ethics is "silly", talk of ethical AI merely to pander to the masses.

* Stelarc -- "The Cadaver, The Comatose and the Chimera"

-- Pushing transhumanism via art, machines inside body, growing organs on the outside - an ear on his arm, attaching his body to the Internet, robotic prosthetics, exoskeletons, bionics, actuated cybernetics, fractal flesh - what is a body?, body augmentation, third arm, 3D printing organs. 

* James Newton-Thomas -- "Impact of the Singularity to the Citizen"

-- The Singularity impacts in simple terms, automation systems in mining, "hype destroys a movement", pick your tipping points - "computation is cheaper than a child in the developed world", don't need complete human brain replication for AI - can outsource in functional terms, outsourcing to the Internet, fiber optics across the planet is faster than the Corpus callosum, brain is very energy efficient (approx 30W constant).