Reflections and Inspirations

This post is the conclusion of the Singularity Summit series, which began with this post.

I enjoyed and was impressed by several of the presentations.  I'll focus on those and say what reaearch or actions they insipre me to do.  Overall, I'm really glad I went to the conference.  It was energizing and interesting.

Michael Nielsen's Mass Collaboration in Science makes me think there are some fun activities one could do with little commitment, yet be contributing to finding some scientific result.  Galaxy Zoo might be fun if you want to pass the time with visual pattern recognition.  I'd like to find out what the Polymath project is, since it's got a cool name and I like math.  I wonder what else is out there?

Gregory Benford was a good advertisement for the products of his company, Genescient.  Said he had more energgy, and he was energetic.  He looks pretty good for 68.  But mostly I liked that he said he wanted to live longer, but wasn't willing to do the calorie restriction thing.  At least we agree on that point.  His companiy's products don't treat disease, so they will be marketed as nutritional supplements.  Hopefully they will be affordable.  It would be nice to take a pill and reverse aging.  Better than taking Kurzweil's 250 pills/day too.

I keep thinking how compelling Jurgen Schmidhuber's simple theory of beauty is.  Linking pleasure and curiosity to ability to further compress data is cool in a nerdy way, and is similar in its simplicity to my theory of humor.  (Jokes set up an expectatio in our heads that causes us to briefly interpret the punchline one way, but then internally switch to another interpretation as we "get" the joke, this sudden switch being pleasurable).  Schmidhuber's theory about converging history may also help explain why time seems to speed up as we age (and why the Singularity may be late).


I'd like to be able to see the wonders a singularity could bring,  If I really want that, then I should be trying to live longer, and working to help bring about the Singularity in a very safe way.

As for how I can do this.  I really like the casually intelligent way Ben Goertzel talks, and I'd like to work with him.  His company, Novamente, is local to Boston, but I don't think I'm qualified to work there.  I may want to try contributing to his open source AI project OpenCog/OpenCogPrime.  This could help me get a job, help bring the Singularity, and help me institue some safety measures into this project, just in case it succeeds.

I'd also like to start working to live longer, but without the deprivation of calorie restriction.  I'd like to get Kurzweil's new book, Transcend, since it discussed several longevity strategies.