See move videos from the 2011 Salt Lake City Singularity Summit here.
SINGULARITY INSTITUTE SUMMIT IN SALT LAKE CITY
Lincoln Cannon, 7 June 2011
Several friends and I had the opportunity to attend the Singularity Summit in Salt Lake City last Saturday. The event was organized by the Singularity Institute and Robert Brazell. The Singularity Institute is an affiliate of Humanity+, which is also affiliated with the Mormon Transhumanist Association.
The topic was emerging technology. Robert Brazell welcomed us with the intriguing notion that reason, rather than knowledge, has become a key scarce resource. That idea was echoed immediately afterward by Michael Vassar, president of the Singularity Institute, who told us that we should seek to understand how to think well enough to teach thinking to a machine.
Next, several speakers focused on emerging medical and health technology. Deepa Kulkarni recounted her personal experience losing the tip of her finger in an accident and using regeneration powder from Acell to regrow it. The pictures of her finger after the accident weren’t pretty, of course, but now her finger, which I had a chance to look at close up, looks wonderfully normal! Zheng Cui talked to us about his cancer research. He explained that cancer resistance can be bred into mice with 40% inheritance, and cancer appears to be seasonal (persons in geographies with winter are four times more likely to get cancer). Now, he’s working on a project to transfer white blood cells from cancer resistant humans to those inflicted with cancer. Dipnarine Maharaj followed up, advising us that we should all bank our own stem cells, for use in future regenerative therapies, while we are still young and healthy.
Jaan Tallinn talked to us about his technology ventures, notably Skype. He commented that we should look for actions that transfer probability from dystopian to utopian futures, and intelligence is the meta-solution to the class of problems associated with dystopian futures. I don’t entirely agree with this idea, at least so far as he presented it. The solution is not merely intelligence, but rather benevolent intelligence. He might agree with that, but I didn’t have an opportunity to ask.
Ray Kurzweil beamed in (like he did for the Singularity University FutureMed executive program I attended recently). He spoke on exponentially advancing technology, as usual. He mentioned that health and medicine are now becoming information technologies; and, once something is an information technology, it progresses exponentially. Look for revolutionary advances in these domains this decade! Read more…