Singularity Summit

Responsible Nanotechnology is one of many sites that have posted on this weekend's Singularity Summit . I sure wish that I could have gone. To some, the idea of the Singularity seems like crazy science-fiction, a "Rapture for nerds" if you will. But it is undeniable that the rate of technological advancement is accelerating. Simply extrapolating on these trends, as Kurzweil does, leads you to some pretty wild predictions. While I don't think a Singularity event is inevitable, I do buy into many of these predictions. As an AI developer, I am the most skeptical about our ability to produce sentient AI any time soon. This is not because we won't have the computing power (we certainly will), rather I think this is a software problem that will require some sort of breakthrough. Super-fast computers or networks aren't just going to "awaken". Somebody's going to have to design intelligence. Of course, Jeff Hawkin's On Intelligence may be planting the seeds of this breakthrough.