Conference: AI & Human Enhancement – Understanding the Future – Early 2020

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Introduction

Overview

The event will address a variety of topics futurology (i.e. accelerating change & long term futures, existential risk, philosophy, transhumanism & ‘the posthuman’) in general though it will have a special focus on Machine Understanding.
How will we operate along side artificial agents that increasingly ‘understand’ us, and important aspects of the world around us?
The ultimate goal of AI is to achieve not just intelligence in the broad scene of the word, but understanding – the ability to understand content & context, comprehend causation, provide explanations and summarize material etc.  Arguably perusing machine understanding has a different focus to artificial ‘general’ intelligence – where a machine could behave with a degree of generality, without actually understanding what it is doing.

To explore the natural questions inherent within this concept the conference aims to draw on the fields of AI, AGI, philosophy, cognitive science and psychology to cover a diverse set of methods, assumptions, approaches, and systems design and thinking in the field of AI and AGI.

We will also explore important ethical questions surrounding transformative technology, how to navigate risks and take advantage of opportunities.

When/Where

Dates: Slated for March or April 2020 – definite dates TBA.

Where: Melbourne, Victoria, Australia!

Speakers

We are currently working on a list of speakers – as at writing, we have confirmed:

John S. Wilkins (philosophy of science/species taxonomy) –   Author of ‘Species: The Evolution of the Idea‘, co-author of ‘The Nature of Classification: Relationships and Kinds in the Natural Sciences‘.   Blogs at ‘Evolving Thoughts‘.

Dr. Kevin B. Korb (philosophy of science/AI)  – Co-founded Bayesian Intelligence with Prof. Ann Nicholson in 2007. He continues to engage in research on the theory and practice of causal discovery of Bayesian networks (aka data mining with BNs), machine learning, evaluation theory, the philosophy of scientific method and informal logic.   Author of ‘Bayesian Artificial Intelligence‘ and co-author of ‘Evolving Ethics‘

 

David Pearce (philosophy, the hedonistic imperative) – British philosopher and co-founder of the World Transhumanist Association, currently rebranded and incorporated as Humanity+, Inc., and a prominent figure within the transhumanist movement. He approaches ethical issues from a lexical negative utilitarian perspective.   Author of ‘The Hedonistic Imperative‘ and ‘The Abolitionist Project‘

Stelarc (performance artist) – Cyprus-born performance artist raised in the Melbourne suburb of Sunshine, whose works focus heavily on extending the capabilities of the human body. As such, most of his pieces are centered on his concept that “the human body is obsolete”.  There is a book about Stelarc and his works – ‘Stelarc: The Monograph (Electronic Culture: History, Theory, and Practice)‘ which is edited by Marquard Smith.

Jakob Hohwy (head of philosophy at Monash University) – philosopher engaged in both conceptual and experimental research. He works on problems in philosophy of mind about perception, neuroscience, and mental illness.  Author of ‘The Predictive Mind‘.

Topics

Human Enhancement, Transhumanism & ‘the Posthuman’

Human enhancement technologies are used not only to treat diseases and disabilities, but increasingly also to increase human capacities and qualities. Certain enhancement technologies are already available, for instance, coffee, mood brighteners, reproductive technologies and plastic surgery.   On the one hand, the scientific community has taken an increasing interest in innovations and allocated substantial public and private resources to them. While on the other hand, such research can have an impact, positive or negative, on individuals, the society, and future generations. Some have advocated the right to use such technologies freely, considering primarily the value of freedom and individual autonomy for those users. Others have called attention to the risks and potential harms of these technologies, not only for the individual, but also for society as a whole. Such use, it is argued, could accentuate the discrimination among persons with different abilities, thus increasing injustice and the gap between the rich and the poor. There is a dilemma regarding how to regulate and manage such practices through national and international laws, so as to safeguard the common good and protect vulnerable persons.

Long Term Value and the Future of Life in the Universe

It seems obvious that we should have a care for future generations – though how far into the future should our concern expire?    This obvious sounding idea can lead to surprising conclusions.

Since the future is big, there could be overwhelmingly far more people in the future than in there are in the present generation. If you want to have a positive impact on lives, and are agnostic as to when the impact is realised, your key concern shouldn’t be to help the present generation, but to ensure that the future goes well for life in the long-term.

This idea is often confused with the claim that we shouldn’t do anything to help people in the present generation. But the long-term value thesis is about what most matters – and what we do to have a positive impact on the future of life in the universe is an extremely important and fascinatingly complicated question.

Artificial Intelligence & Understanding

Following on from a workshop at AGI17 on ‘Understanding Understanding’ we will cover many fascinating questions, such as:

  • What is understanding?
    • How should we define understanding?
    • Is understanding an emergent property of intelligent systems? And/or a central property of intelligent systems?
    • What are the typologies or gradations of understanding?
    • Does understanding relate to consciousness?  If so how?
    • Is general intelligence necessary and/or sufficient to achieve understanding in an artificial system?
    • What differentiates systems that do and do not have understanding?
  • Why focus on developing machine understanding?
    • Isn’t human understanding enough?
    • What are the pros/cons of developing MU?
    • Is it ethical to develop it?
    • Does morality come along for the ride once MU is achieved?
    • How could MU help solve the ‘value loading’ problem in AI alignment?
  • How create machine understanding?
    • What is required in order to achieve understanding in machines?
    • How can we create systems that exhibit understanding?
    • and how can we test for understanding?
    • Can understanding be achieved through hand-crafted architectures or must it emerge through self-organizing (constructivist) principles?
    • How can mainstream techniques be used towards the development of machines which exhibit understanding?
    • Do we need radically different approaches than those in use today to build systems with understanding?
    • Does building artificially intelligent machines with versus without understanding depend on the same underlying principles, or are these orthogonal approaches?
    • Do we need special programming languages to implement understanding in intelligent systems?
    • How can current state of the art methods in AGI address the need for understanding in machines?
  • When is machine understanding likely to occur?
    • What types of research/discoveries are likely to accelerate progress towards MU?
    • What may hinder progress?

The conference will also cover aspects of futurology in general, including transhumanism, posthumanism, reducing suffering, and the long term future.

 

 

Future Day Melbourne 2019

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Future Day is nigh – sporting a spectacular line of speakers!

Agenda

5.30Doors open – meet and greet other attendees
5.45Introduction
6.00Drew Berry – “The molecular machines that create your flesh and blood” [abstract]
6.45Brock Bastian – “Happiness, culture, mental illness, and the future self” [abstract]
7.30Lynette Plenderleith: “The future of biodiversity starts now” [abstract]
8.15Panel: Drew Berry, Brock Bastian, Lynette Plenderleith
Join the MeetupFuture Day is on the 21st of March - sporting a spectacular line of speakers ranging from Futurology, Philosophy, Biomedical Animation & Psychology!

Venue: KPMG Melbourne – 727 Collins St [map link] – Collins Square – Level 36 Room 2

Limited seating to about 40, though if there is overflow, there will be standing room.

PLEASE have a snack/drink before you come. Apparently we can’t supply food/drink at KPMG, so eat something beforehand – or work up and appetite…
Afterwards we will sojourn at a local pub for some grub and ale.

I’m looking forward to seeing people I have met before, and some new faces as well.

– Drew Berry – Biomedical Animator @ The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research –
– Brock Bastian – Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences University of Melbourne

Check out the Future Day Facebook Group, and the Twitter account!

Abstracts

The molecular machines that create your flesh and blood

By Drew Berry – Abstract: A profound technological revolution is underway in bio-medical science, accelerating development of new therapies and treatments for the diseases that afflict us and also transforming how we perceive ourselves and the nature of our living bodies. Coupled to the accelerating pace of scientific discovery is an ever expanding need to explain to the public and develop appreciation of our new biomedical capabilities, to prepare the public for the tsunami of new knowledge and medicines that will impact patients, our families and community.
Drew Berry will present the latest visualisation experiments in creating cinematic movies and real-time interactive 3D molecular worlds, that reveal the current state of the art scientific discovery, focusing on the molecular engines that covert the food you eat into the chemical energy that powers your cells and tissues. Leveraging the incredible power of game GPU technology, vast molecular landscapes can be generated for 3D 360 degree cinema for museum and science centre dome theatres, interactive exploration in VR, and Augmented Reality education via student mobile phones.

 

Happiness, culture, mental illness, and the future self

By Brock Bastian – Abstract: What is the future of human happiness and wellbeing. We are currently treating mental illness at the level of individuals, yet rates of mental illness are not going down, and in some cases continue to rise. I will present research indicating that we need to start to tackle this problem at the level of culture. The cultural values places on particular emotional states may play a role in how people respond to their own emotional worlds. Furthermore, I will present evidence that basic cultural differences in how we explain events, predict the future and understand ourselves may also impact on the effectiveness of our capacity to deal with emotional events. This suggests that we need to begin to take culture seriously in how we treat mental illness. It also provides some important insights into what kind of thinking styles we might seek to promote and how we might seek to understand and shape our future selves. This also has implications for how we might find happiness in a world increasingly characterized by residential mobility, weak ties, and digital rather than face-to-face interaction.

 

The future of biodiversity starts now

By Lynette Plenderleith – Abstract: Biodiversity is vital to our food security, our industries, our health and our progress. Yet never before has the future of biodiversity been so under threat as we modify more land, burn more fossil fuels and transport exotic organisms around the planet. But in the face of catastrophic biodiversity collapse, scientists, community groups and not-for-profits are working to discover new ways to conserve biodiversity, for us and the rest of life on our planet. From techniques as simple as preserving habitat to complex scientific techniques like de-extinction, Lynette will discuss our options for the future to protect biodiversity, how the future of biodiversity could look and why we should start employing conservation techniques now. Our future relies on the conservation of  biodiversity and its future rests in our hands. We have the technology to protect it.

 

Biographies

Dr Drew Berry

Dr Drew Berry is a biomedical animator who creates beautiful, accurate visualisations of the dramatic cellular and molecular action that is going on inside our bodies. He began his career as a cell biologist and is fluent navigating technical reports, research data and models from scientific journals. As an artist, he works as a translator, transforming abstract and complicated scientific concepts into vivid and meaningful visual journeys. Since 1995 he has been a biomedical animator at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, Australia. His animations have exhibited at venues such as the Guggenheim Museum, MoMA, the Royal Institute of Great Britain and the University of Geneva. In 2010, he received a MacArthur Fellowship “Genius Grant”.

Recognition and awards

• Doctorate of Technology (hc), Linköping University Sweden, 2016
• MacArthur Fellowship, USA 2010
• New York Times “If there is a Steven Spielberg of molecular animation, it is probably Drew Berry” 2010
• The New Yorker “[Drew Berry’s] animations are astonishingly beautiful” 2008
• American Scientist “The admirers of Drew Berry, at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Australia, talk about him the way Cellini talked about Michelangelo” 2009
• Nature Niche Prize, UK 2008
• Emmy “DNA” Windfall Films, UK 2005
• BAFTA “DNA Interactive” RGB Co, UK 2004

Animation http://www.wehi.tv
TED http://www.ted.com/talks/drew_berry_animations_of_unseeable_biology
Architectural projection https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9AA5x-qhm8
Björk video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wa1A0pPc-ik
Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drew_Berry

Assoc Prof Brock Bastian

Brock Bastian is a social psychologist whose research focuses on pain, happiness, and morality.

In his search for a new perspective on what makes for the good life, Brock Bastian has studied why promoting happiness may have paradoxical effects; why we need negative and painful experiences in life to build meaning, purpose, resilience, and ultimately greater fulfilment in life; and why behavioural ethics is necessary for understanding how we reason about personal and social issues and resolve conflicts of interest. His first book, The Other Side of Happiness, was published in January 2018.

 

The Other Side of Happiness: Embracing a More Fearless Approach to Living

Our addiction to positivity and the pursuit of pleasure is actually making us miserable. Brock Bastian shows that, without some pain, we have no real way to achieve and appreciate the kind of happiness that is true and transcendent.

Read more about The Other Side of Happiness →

Dr. Lynette Plenderleith

Dr. Lynette Plenderleith is a wildlife biologist by training and is now a media science specialist, working mostly in television, with credits including children’s show WAC!
World Animal Championships and Gardening Australia. Lynette is Chair and Founder of Frogs Victoria, President of the Victorian branch of Australian Science Communicators and occasional performer of live science-comedy. Lynette has a Ph.D from Monash University, where she studied the ecology of native Australian frogs, a Master’s degree in the spatial ecology of salamanders from Towson University in the US and a BSc in Natural Sciences from Lancaster University in her homeland – the UK.
Twitter: @lynplen
Website: lynplen.com

 

 

The Future is not a product

It’s more exciting than gadgets with shiny screens and blinking lights.

Future Day is a way of focusing and celebrating the energy that more and more people around the world are directing toward creating a radically better future.

How should Future Day be celebrated? That is for us to decide as the future unfolds!

  • Future Day could be adopted as an official holiday by countries around the world.
  • Children can do Future Day projects at school, exploring their ideas and passions about creating a better future.
  • Future Day costume parties — why not? It makes at least as much sense as dressing up to celebrate halloween!
  • Businesses giving employees a day off from routine concerns, to think creatively about future projects
  • Special Future Day issues in newspapers, magazines and blogs
  • Use your imagination — that’s what the future is all about!

The Future & You

It’s time to create the future together!

Our aspirations are all too often sidetracked in this age of distraction. Lurking behind every unfolding minute is a random tangent with no real benefit for our future selves – so let’s ritualize our commitment to the future by celebrating it! Future Day is here to fill our attention economies with useful ways to solve the problems of arriving at desirable futures, & avoid being distracted by the usual gauntlet of noise we run every other day. Our future is very important – accelerating scientific & technological progress will change the world even more than it already has. While other days of celebration focus on the past – let’s face the future – an editable history of a time to come – a future that is glorious for everyone.

Videos from Previous Future Day Events / Interviews

Towards the Abolition of Suffering Through Science

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An online panel focusing on reducing suffering & paradise engineering through the lens of science.

Panelists: Andrés Gómez Emilsson, David Pearce, Brian Tomasik and Mike Johnson

Note, consider skipping to to 10:19 to bypass some audio problems in the beginning!!


Topics

Andrés Gómez Emilsson: Qualia computing (how to use consciousness for information processing, and why that has ethical implications)

  • How do we know consciousness is causally efficacious? Because we are conscious and evolution can only recruit systems/properties when they do something (and they do it better than the available alternatives).
  • What is consciousness’ purpose on animals?  (Information processing).
  • What is consciousness’ comparative advantage?  (Phenomenal binding).
  • Why does this matter for suffering reduction? Suffering has functional properties that play a role in the inclusive fitness of organisms. If we figure out exactly what role they play (by reverse-engineering the computational properties of consciousness), we can substitute them by equally (or better) functioning non-conscious or positive hedonic-tone analogues.
  • What is the focus of Qualia Computing? (it focuses on basic fundamental questions and simple experimental paradigms to get at them (e.g. computational properties of visual qualia via psychedelic psychophysics)).

Brian Tomasik:

  • Space colonization “Colonization of space seems likely to increase suffering by creating (literally) astronomically more minds than exist on Earth, so we should push for policies that would make a colonization wave more humane, such as not propagating wild-animal suffering to other planets or in virtual worlds.”
  • AGI safety “It looks likely that artificial general intelligence (AGI) will be developed in the coming decades or centuries, and its initial conditions and control structures may make an enormous impact to the dynamics, values, and character of life in the cosmos.”,
  • Animals and insects “Because most wild animals die, often painfully, shortly after birth, it’s plausible that suffering dominates happiness in nature. This is especially plausible if we extend moral considerations to smaller creatures like the ~1019 insects on Earth, whose collective neural mass outweighs that of humanity by several orders of magnitude.”

Mike Johnson:

  • If we successfully “reverse-engineer” the patterns for pain and pleasure, what does ‘responsible disclosure’ look like? Potential benefits and potential for abuse both seem significant.
  • If we agree that valence is a pattern in a dataset, what’s a good approach to defining the dataset, and what’s a good heuristic for finding the pattern?
  • What order of magnitude is the theoretical potential of mood enhancement? E.g., 2x vs 10x vs 10^10x
  • What are your expectations of the distribution of suffering in the world? What proportion happens in nature vs within the boundaries of civilization? What are counter-intuitive sources of suffering? Do we know about ~90% of suffering on the earth, or ~.001%?
  • Valence Research, The Mystery of Pain & Pleasure.
  • Why is it such an exciting time round about now to be doing valence research?  Are we at a sweet spot in history with this regard?  What is hindering valence research? (examples of muddled thinking, cultural barriers etc?)
  • How do we use the available science to improve the QALY? GiveDirectly has used change in cortisol levels to measure effectiveness, and the EU (what’s EU stand for?) evidently does something similar involving cattle. It seems like a lot of the pieces for a more biologically-grounded QALY- and maybe a SQALY (Species and Quality-Adjusted Life-Year)- are available, someone just needs to put them together. I suspect this one of the lowest-hanging highest-leverage research fruits.

David Pearce: The ultimate scope of our moral responsibilities. Assume for a moment that our main or overriding goal should be to minimise and ideally abolish involuntary suffering. I typically assume that (a) only biological minds suffer and (b) we are probably alone within our cosmological horizon. If so, then our responsibility is “only” to phase out the biology of involuntary suffering here on Earth and make sure it doesn’t spread or propagate outside our solar system. But Brian, for instance, has quite a different metaphysics of mind, most famously that digital characters in video games can suffer (now only a little – but in future perhaps a lot). The ramifications here for abolitionist bioethics are far-reaching.

 

Other:
– Valence research, Qualia computing (how to use consciousness for information processing, and why that has ethical implications),  animal suffering, insect suffering, developing an ethical Nozick’s Experience Machine, long term paradise engineering, complexity and valence
– Effective Altruism/Cause prioritization and suffering reduction – People’s practical recommendations for the best projects that suffering reducers can work on (including where to donate, what research topics to prioritize, what messages to spread). – So cause prioritization applied directly to the abolition of suffering?
– what are the best projects people can work on to reduce suffering? and what to work on first? (including where to donate, what research topics to prioritize, what messages to spread)
– If we successfully “reverse-engineer” the patterns for pain and pleasure, what does ‘responsible disclosure’ look like? Potential benefits and potential for abuse both seem significant
– If we agree that valence is a pattern in a dataset, what’s a good approach to defining the dataset, and what’s a good heuristic for finding the pattern?
– What order of magnitude is the theoretical potential of mood enhancement? E.g., 2x vs 10x vs 10^10x

Panelists

David Pearce: http://hedweb.com/
Mike Johnson: http://opentheory.net/
Andrés Gómez Emilsson: http://qualiacomputing.com/
Brain Tomasik: http://reducing-suffering.org/
‪

 

#hedweb ‪#EffectiveAltruism ‪#HedonisticImperative ‪#AbolitionistProject

The event was hosted on the 10th of August 2015, Venue: The Internet

Towards the Abolition of Suffering Through Science was hosted by Adam Ford for Science, Technology and the Future.

Towards the Abolition of Suffering Through Science

Towards the Abolition of Suffering Through Science

Future Day Melbourne 2017

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WHERE: The Bull & Bear Tavern – 347 Flinders Lane (btw Queen and Elizabeth streets) Melbourne  WHEN – Wednesday March 1st 2017
See the Facebook event, and the Meetup Event.

SCHEDULE

* Noushin Shabab ‘The Evolution of Cybersecurity – Looking Towards 2045’ (Senior Security Researcher at Kaspersky Lab) – 20 mins
* Luke James (Science Party Melbourne) a (nonpartisan) talk about promises and pitfalls of government and future technology – 20 mins
* Dushan Phillips – To be what one is.. (spoken word) – 20 mins
* Patrick Poke – The Future of Finance – 20 mins
* There will also be discussion on the up and coming March for Science in Melbourne! (April 22nd) – 10 – 15 mins

Abstracts/Synopsis:

Promises and Pitfalls of Government and Future Technology

By Luke James

My talk is focusing on the interaction between technological developments (future tech) and government. From the point of view of government and from the point of view of those developing and trying to use new tech. I have a couple of scenarios to go over in which government has reacted poorly and well to new technologies and when new tech has integrated poorly and well with governments. Then I’ll speak about the policies and systems governments can utilise to encourage and take advantage of new tech. Which will lead me in to my final topic which will be a few minutes about the March for Science. I’ll leave a few minutes for questions at the end as well.
Throughout the speech I’ll be speaking about government purely from a systematic standpoint.

The Evolution of Cybersecurity – Looking Towards 2045

By Noushin Shabab

“Journey through the top cybersecurity criminal cases caught by the Global Research And Analysis Team (GReAT) from Kaspersky Lab and find out their current and future trends in cybercriminal activity.”

The Future of Finance

By Patrick Poke

 

  • I’ll start off with a bit of an introduction on what the finance industry is really about and where we are now.
  • I’ll then discuss some of the problems/opportunities that we face now (as these will form the basis for future changes.
  • I’ll go through some expectations over the short-term, medium-term, and long-term.
  • Finally, look at some of the over-hyped areas where I don’t think we’ll see as much change as people expect.

 

To be what one is..

By Dushan Phillips

TBA

 

About Future Day

“Humanity is on the edge of understanding that our future will be astoundingly different from the world we’ve lived in these last several generations. Accelerating technological change is all around us, and transformative solutions are near at hand for all our problems, if only we have the courage to see them. Future Day helps us to foresee our personal potentials, and acknowledge that we have the power to pull together and push our global system to a whole new level of collective intelligence, resiliency, diversity, creativity, and adventure. Want to help build a more foresighted culture? Don’t wait for permission, start celebrating it now!” – John Smart

Future Day is a global day of focusing and celebrating the energy that more and more people around the world are directing toward creating a radically better future.

The Future & You

We all have aspirations, yet we are all too often sidetracked in this age of distraction – however, to firmly ritualize our commitment to the future, each year we celebrate the future seeking to address the glorious problems involved in arriving at a future that we want. Lurking behind every unfolding minute is the potential for a random tangent with no real benefit for our future selves – so it is Future Day to the rescue! A day to remind us to include more of the future in our attention economies, and help us to procrastinate being distracted by the usual gauntlet of noise we run every other day. We take seriously the premise that our future is very important – the notion that *accelerating technological progress will change the world* deserves a lot more attention than that which can be gleaned from most other days of celebration. So, let us remind ourselves to remember the future – an editable history of a time to come – a future, that without our conscious deliberation and positive action, may not be the future that we intended.

Ethics In An Uncertain World – Australian Humanist Convention 2017

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Join Peter Singer & AC Grayling to discuss some of the most pressing issues facing society today – surviving the Trump era, Climate Change, Naturalism & the Future of Humanity.

Ethics In An Uncertain World

After an incredibly successful convention in Brisbane in May, 2016, the Humanist Society of Victoria together with the Council of Australian Humanist Societies will be hosting Australian Humanists at the start of April to discuss and learn about some of the most pressing issues facing society today and how Humanists and the world view we hold can help to shape a better future for all of society.

Official Conference Link – Get Tickets Here | Gala Dinner | FAQs | Meetup Link | Google Map Link

Lineup

AC Grayling – Humanism, the individual and society
Peter Singer – Public Ethics in the Trump Era
Clive Hamilton – Humanism and the Anthropocene
Meredith Doig – Interbelief presentations in schools
Monica Bini – World-views in the school curriculum
James Fodor – ???
Adam Ford – Humanism & Population Axiology

SciFuture supports and endorses the Humanist Convention in 2017 in efforts to explore ethics foundational in enlightenment values, march against prejudice, and help make sense of the world. SciFuture affirms that human beings (and indeed many other nonhuman animals) have the right to flourish, be happy, and give meaning and shape to their own lives.

Peter Singer wrote about Taking Humanism Beyond Speciesism – Free Inquiry, 24, no. 6 (Oct/Nov 2004), pp. 19-21

AC Grayling’s talk on Humanism at the British Humanists Association:

 

Zombie Rights

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andrew-dun-zombie-rightsAndrew Dun provides an interesting discussion on the rights of sentient entities. Drawing inspiration from quantum complementarity, defends a complementary notion of ontological dualism, countering zombie hypotheses. Sans zombie concerns, ethical discussions should therefore focus on assessing consciousness purely in terms of the physical-functional properties of any putatively conscious entity.

Below is the video of the presentation:

At 12:17 point, Andrew introduces the notion of Supervenience (where high level properties supervene on low-level properties) – do zombies have supervenience? Is consciousness merely a supervenient property that supervenes on characteristics of brain states? If so, we should be able to compute whether a system is conscious (if we do know its full physical characterization). The zombie hypothesis suggests that consciousness does not logically supervene on the physical.

Slides for presentation can be found on slide-share!

Andrew Dun spoke at the Singularity Summit. Talk title : “Zombie Rights”.

Andrew’s research interest relates to both the ontology and ethics of consciousness. Andrew is interested in the ethical significance of consciousness, including the way in which our understanding of consciousness impacts our treatment of other humans, non-human animals, and artifacts. Andrew defends the view that the relationship between physical and conscious properties is one of symmetrical representation, rather than supervenience. Andrew argues that on this basis we can confidently approach ethical questions about consciousness from the perspective of ‘common-sense’ materialism.

Andrew also composes and performs original music.

Extending Life is Not Enough

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Dr Randal Koene covers the motivation for human technological augmentation and reasons to go beyond biological life extension.

randal_koene_squareCompetition is an inescapable occurrence in the animate and even in the inanimate universe. To give our minds the flexibility to transfer and to operate in different substrates bestows upon our species the most important competitive advantage.” I am a neuroscientist and neuroengineer who is currently the Science Director at Foundation 2045, and the Lead Scientist at Kernel, and I head the organization carboncopies.org, which is the outreach and roadmapping organization for the development of substrate-independent minds (SIM) and also previously participated in the ambitious and fascinating efforts of the nanotechnology startup Halcyon Molecular in Silicon Valley.

Slides of talk online here
Video of Talk:

Points discussed in the talk:
1. Biological Life-Extension is Not Enough Randal A. Koene Carboncopies.org
2. PERSONAL
3. No one wants to live longer just to live longer. Motivation informs Method.
4. Having an Objective, a Goal, requires that you have some notion of success.
5. Creating (intelligent) machines that have the capabilities we do not — is not as good as being able to experience them ourselves… Imagine… creating/playing music. Imagine… being the kayak.Imagine… perceiving the background radiation of the universe.
6. Is being out of the loop really your goal?
7. Near-term goals: Extended lives without expanded minds are in conflict with creative development.
8. Social
9. Gene survival is extremely dependent on an environment — it is unlikely to survive many changes.Worse… gene replication does not sustain that which we care most about!
10. Is CTGGAGTAC better than GTTGACTGAC? We are vessels for that game — but for the last10,000 years something has been happening!
11. Certain future experiences are desirable, others are not — these are your perspectives, the memes you champion…Death keeps stealing our champions, our experts.
12. Too early to do uploading? – No! The big perspective is relevant now. We don’t like myopic thinking in our politicians, lets not be myopic about world issues ourselves.
13. SPECIES
14. Life-extension in biology may increase the fragility of our species & civilization… More people? – Resources. Less births? – Fewer novel perspectives. Expansion? – Environmental limitation.
15. Biological life-extension within the same evolutionary niche = further specialization to the same performance “over-training” in conflict with generalization
16. Aubrey de Grey: Ultimately, desires “uploading”
17. TECHNICAL
18. Significant biological life-extension is incredibly difficult and beset by threats. Reality vs. popular perception.
19. Life-extension and Substrate-Independence are two different objectives
20. Developing out of a “catchment area” (S. Gildert) may demand iterations of exploration — and exploration involves risk.Hard-wired delusions and drives. What would an AGI do? Which types of AGI would exist in the long run?
21. “Uploading” is just one step of many — but a necessary step — for a truly advanced species
22. Thank You carboncopies.orgrandal.a.koene@carboncopies.org

http://www.carboncopies.org/singularity-summit-australia-2012
http://2012.singularitysummit.com.au/2012/11/randal-koene-extending-life-is-not-enough/

There is a short promo-interview for the Singularity Summit AU 2012 conference that Adam Ford did with Dr. Koene, though unfortunately the connection was a bit unreliable, which is noticeable in the video:

Most of those videos are available through the SciFuture YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/TheRationalFuture

randal-koene-extending-life-is-not-enough

Lawrence Krauss, Ben Goertzel and Steve Omohundro on the Perils of Prediction

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Panel on the Perils of Prediction where Lawrence Krauss , Steve Omohundro and Ben Goertzel set sail on an epic adventure careening through the perilous waves of prediction! And the seas are angry my friends! Our future stands upon the prow our past drowns in the wake. Our most foolish sailors leave the shore without a compass and an eyeglass. We need to stretch our forecasting abilities further than our intuitions and evolved biases allow.

Video of the panel

Filmed at the Singularity Summit Australia 2011 http://2011.singularitysummit.com.au

Lawrence Krauss - SmilingLawrence Maxwell Krauss (born May 27, 1954) is a Canadian-American theoretical physicist who is a professor of physics, Foundation Professor of the School of Earth and Space Exploration, and director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University. He is the author of several bestselling books, including The Physics of Star Trek and A Universe from Nothing. He is an advocate of scientific skepticism, science education, and the science of morality.

 

Ben Goertzel (born December 8, 1966 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), is an American author and researcher in the field of artificial intelligence. He currently leads Novamente LLC, a privately held software company that attempts to develop a form of strong AI, which he calls “Artificial General Intelligence”. He is also the CEO of Biomind LLC, a company that markets a software product for the AI-supported analysis of biological microarray data; and he is an advisor to the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and formerly its Director of Research.

steve_omohundro_headSteve Omohundro is an American scientist known for his research on Hamiltonian physics, dynamical systems, programming languages, machine learning, machine vision, and the social implications of artificial intelligence. His current work uses rational economics to develop safe and beneficial intelligent technologies for better collaborative modeling, understanding, innovation, and decision making.

Conference: Thinking Machines in the Physical World

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“Thinking Machines in the Physical World” invites cross-disciplinary conversations about the opportunities and threats presented by advances in cognitive computing:
  – What concrete, real-world possibilities does intelligence-focused technology open up?
  – What potential effects will “smart computers” exert on labor and jobs around the globe?
  – What are the broader social implications of these changes?

When: Wednesday, July 13, 2016 8:30 AM until Friday ~6pm (then dinner)
Where: Melbourne Uni Law School Building, Level 10 185 Pelham Street, Carlton

Keynotes (see details here):

Prof Brian Anderson – Distinguished Professor at ANU College of Engineering and Computer Science.

Dr James Hughes – Executive Director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.

Prof M. Vidyasagar – Cecil & Ida Green Chair in Systems Biology Science

Prof Judy Wajcman – Anthony Giddens Professor of Sociology, London School of Economics

Dr. Juerg von Kaenel, IBM Research – Cognitive Computing – IBM Watson

Register here | Main website | Program

Professor Graeme Clark, AC Laureate Professor Emeritus  says “It gives me great pleasure to have the opportunity to welcome your interest in the work of Norbert Wiener and invite you to Melbourne to participate in this important conference.”

Official Website: http://21stcenturywiener.org/
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etBMY6Orj50
Meetup: http://www.meetup.com/Science-Technology-and-the-Future/events/228816058/
Google+: https://plus.google.com/events/chcmpbupi30ffps4kf94gtn2rpc
Facebook Event: https://www.facebook.com/events/625367860953411/

The long-term future of AI (and what we can do about it) : Daniel Dewey at TEDxVienna

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daniel deweyThis has been one of my favourite simple talks on AI Impacts – Simple, clear and straight to the point. Recommended as an introduction to the ideas (referred to in the title).

I couldn’t find the audio of this talk at TED – it has been added to archive.org:

 

Daniel Dewey is a research fellow in the Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology at the Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford. His research includes paths and timelines to machine superintelligence, the possibility of intelligence explosion, and the strategic and technical challenges arising from these possibilities. Previously, Daniel worked as a software engineer at Google, did research at Intel Research Pittsburgh, and studied computer science and philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University. He is also a research associate at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.

http://www.tedxvienna.at/