Singularity Summit – Enlightened Machines, plus an Exclusive Interview with Peter Diamandis
ValleyZen was invited to the third Singularity Summit 2008 – a conference discussing “The Singularity” a point at which machines will be able to surpass human intelligence. Ray Kurzweil, CEO of Kurzweil Technologies and author of The Singularity is Near headlined the conference along with technological and academic heavyweights like Intel CTO Justin Rattner, X PRIZE Foundation Founder, Chair & CEO Peter Diamandis, Investor/Entrepreneur Esther Dyson, MIT Center for Bits and Atoms Director Neil Gershenfeld, CEO of Novamente, director of research at SIAI, Ben Goertzel, and over a dozen others.
Making a Machine ZEN
At a private reception hosted the night before the conference at the Tech Museum, we spoke with Ben Goertzel. Drue asked Ben if a machine could reach enlightenment. Please check out his response. It’s sure to provoke you:
“If you take a fairly mechanical view…then you can say there are certain activation patterns in the brain that correlate with a state of enlightenment. So you could make an AI with a similar kind of structure. It would be an enlightened computer. Of course, then it gets interesting, because a human —to get in that state of mind (which I wouldn’t claimed to have done) has to go through years and years and years of systematic practice. With an AI you could just build it and…then you could just copy it like a computer program.
In that sense – it would seem possible that AI has greater potential for enlightened states of mind than people. For us, meditation practice is so much a struggle against emotions, wired into your hind brain and then against your tendency to get distracted by various things. But an artificial mind wouldn’t have to be built with those problems in the first place…It’s very interesting. All this is very speculative. You’d actually have to build the AIs, experiment with them and asked them what they experienced.“
But to build this AI, we wondered about the presumptions you would have to start with. First, how do you answer the question — What is enlightenment? Hopefully comments from YOU our reader community, will give some partial or whole answers. ValleyZen dares you!
Kurzweil on ValleyZen
When we talked to Ray Kurzweil he told us that he liked the name and concept “ValleyZen” very much. When Drue asked him about the importance of Zen in the Valley he riffed on the logic-breaking, satori-inducing Zen Koan: “Koans are very compelling…we live in a world where we need to get away from pat answers more than ever.” Bill immediately thought of the impact koans could have on our education system. What do you think?
A ValleyZen Koan
So at the end of the next day after listening to Kurzweil’s final speech, we thought it would be great to challenge Kurzweill with a ValleyZen koan.
“We have a ValleyZen koan for you…
If as Shunryu Suzuki says — A Zen mind is a beginner’s mind – Can an Artificial Mind Become a Zen Mind?”
“Machines will be able to multi-process better than us, so yes they will be able to meditate and carry on a conversation — all while engaging in a romantic relationship in Second Life with a biological human,” he smiled.
ValleyZen readers – if you have a response to the koan or thoughts on enlightening machines please share!
Peter Diamandis, X Prize Founder Exclusive Interview
Peter Diamandis’ motto is The best way to predict the future is to create it yourself! (See our previous ValleyZen post on Peter Diamandis and X Prize. He gave a rousing presentation at the culmination of the conference. “Why do we explore space? …There are three drivers, Fear, Curiosity, and Wealth.” His next statement was met with laughter:
“You can easily measure the ratio of fear to curiosity as the ratio of the Defense budget to the science budget.”
Are you our next Trillionaire?
Listen up!!! — Diamandis outlined the path for the planet’s first trillionaires. The financial potential of mining asteroids for iron, iridium, platinum, osmium or palladium is out of this world. A single asteroid could yield $22 trillion in metal. “Everything we hold of value on earth, metal, minerals, energy, real estate are in near infinite quantities in space. It is fundamentally the future — the same way we Americans thought of Alaska in the 1850s as a vast faraway resource-laden land.”
A 100 Billion Dollar Hotel
“I’ve had the honor of founding Zero G and co-founding Space Adventures – We fly folks into orbit on the Soyuz. Instead of going to the socialist US we go to capitalist Russia.” A slide of the international space station came on screen — “And this is the hundred billion dollar hotel we fly them to.”
“I like to think of space tourists as self-loading carbon-based payloads that come with their own money,” smiled Diamandis.
Stephen Hawking and Newton’s Apple in Zero G
Especially awe-inspiring were photos that Peter Diamandis shared of his recent trip into Zero G with world renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking. They flew with an apple as a tribute to Isaac Newton. Hawking holds the professorship at Cambridge University that was held by Newton in the 1600s.
Rumors of the Singularity University
Yes..that’s all that can be said!
Afterwards, hundreds of conference attendees poured into the Montgomery Theater lobby, abuzz with spaceflight and X Prizes of the future. Immediately following, Bruce Klein, Singularity Summit Producer and Director of Outreach arranged for ValleyZen to do an exclusive interview with Diamandis, on the main stage. Watch the video clip:
I never get mad at my Powerbook (it’s almost flawless!) or any device, that serves me well and sometimes fails. Like a forgiving mother, I think, it is only an instrument. Reading this post’s headline, I also thought, we humans will have to catch up with the “enlightened machines”. The thought and the joke that the computer may outthink us and take a life on its own, came up soon after its invention. I think all matter, as well as all Universe is alive and pulsates on different levels. Does our consciousness give the matter life or is life encoded in its essence? Computers now can already be activated with our mind to greatly aid quadriplegic and other disabled persons communicate with the world outside. Are we humans the magic’s apprentice? If the “artificial intelligence” surpasses our own, let’s think it benign – not creating havoc with the atmosphere, the Universe!