An invitation to the next Horizon Forum meeting at the University of Minnesota:

Education and the Technological Singularity

January 27, 2010
11:30am – 1:30pm
250 Wulling Hall (U of M East Bank)
At the next Horizon Forum, you are invited to join the discussion, moderated by Arthur Harkins and John Moravec, with special guests, as we probe into the deep [...]

Education Futures celebrates its first five years of exploring new futures in human capital development with a timeline of the history of education from 1657-2045. This timeline provides not only a glimpse into modern education, but plots out a plausible future history for human capital development. The future history presented is intended to be edgy, [...]

We haven’t had an opportunity to screen Ray Kurzweil’s the film, Transcendent Man, yet, but The Futurist magazine published a preview:
Scene: A movie theater on the west side of Manhattan during the Tribeca Film Festival. The audience teems with hip New York film students eager to see the world premiere of a new documentary. They’re [...]

From this morning’s MACTA keynote address: Co-constructing Career and Technical Education for the 21st Century
Career and Technical Education is poised at the inflection point of a technological and social change process identified as the “J” Curve. Just like the letter J, the “J” Curve describes a sharp upward turn in the exponentially accelerating rate [...]

Eliezer Yudkowsky, on the SIAI blog, posted his observations of the emergence of three “logically distinct” schools of thought related to the Singularity:

Accelerating change (Ray Kurzweil, Alvin Toffler, John Smart): “technological change feeds on itself, and therefore accelerates” along a predictable curve.
Event Horizon (Vernor Vinge): “Shortly, technology will advance to the point of improving on [...]

Two articles related to the Singularity Summit have appeared on preparing for the Technological Singularity:
First, Jamais Cascio writes on a Metaverse Roadmap Overview:
In this work, along with my colleagues John Smart and Jerry Paffendorf, I sketch out four scenarios of how a combination of forces driving the development of immersive, richly connected information technologies may [...]

In an interview with Silicon.com, William Gibson declares that he’s given up on envisioning futures:
We hit a point somewhere in the mid-18th century where we started doing what we think of technology today and it started changing things for us, changing society. Since World War II it’s going literally exponential and what we are experiencing [...]

Presented at the JTET conference this morning:

Arthur M. Harkins, Ph.D. (USA)
John Moravec, Ph.D. (USA)
University of Minnesota
Abstract
This presentation is concerned with complex subjects, but presents them in ways that audiences can understand and professionally contemplate. The core concept of the paper is “sustainable innovation,” which presumes the necessity for continuous innovation to cope with changes [...]

The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI) has launched a blog covering research and outreach updates, videos, articles, papers, events, goals, and relevant science and technology news.
SIAI is a not-for-profit research institute in Palo Alto, California, with three major goals: furthering the nascent science of safe, beneficial advanced artificial intelligence (self-improving systems) through research and [...]

The folks at the Technology Evangelist blog did a remarkable job in recording Ray Kurzweil’s talk at the Killer App Expo and feeding video to the net. Benjamin J. Higginbotham writes:
Ray Kurzweil is a pioneer in the fields of optical character recognition, health, artificial intelligence, transhumanism, technological singularity and futurism. At the Killer App [...]