The Singularity

Next Horizon Forum roundtable: Education and the Technological Singularity

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1/13/2010

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 [...]


The Education Futures timeline of education

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12/21/2009

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, [...]


Kurzweil’s Transcendent Man

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10/15/2009

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. [...]


Slides from this morning’s MACTA presentation

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2/12/2008

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 [...]


Three Singularities, three conversations

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10/1/2007

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 [...]


Six scenarios for the Technological Singularity

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9/10/2007

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 [...]


Are writers nearing the limits of human imagination?

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8/9/2007

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 [...]


Designing education for sustainable innovation

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5/31/2007

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 [...]


Singularity Institute blog launched

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5/29/2007

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 [...]


Technology Evangelist: Kurzweil at Killer App Expo

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5/23/2007

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 [...]


Related posts

Will Wright: Motivation is more important than education

From the Chronicle of Higher Education: Will Wright, the video-game designer responsible for some of the best-selling titles of all time, says that video games are better at inspiring students to learn than actually teaching them.


Virtual worlds colliding

Two interesting pieces of news emerged on virtual worlds: At the Virtual Worlds Conference, IBM and Linden Labs announced plans to develop a set of open standards that would allow avatars to traverse from one virtual environment to another. Multiverse Network is building tools that will allow virtual world developers to access and incorporate elements [...]


Designing education for sustainable innovation

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 [...]


The “great Singularity debate”

ZDNet is running a blog story on the Singularity Summit at Stanford University. Particular attention in the article is focused on the debate between Ray Kurzweil and Douglas Hofstader on utopian versus dystopian futures: Kurzweil acknowledged that Singularity could lead to an unappealing or cataclysmic future, but he believes his vision will have a soft [...]


Kurzweil: The singularity is near

Here is a book to watch out for: The singularity is near by Ray Kurzweil, to be released in September, 2005. The following information is cut-and-pasted from Amazon.com‘s description of the volume: Product Details Hardcover: 624 pages Publisher: Viking Adult (September 22, 2005) ISBN: 0670033847 Book Description The great inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil is [...]


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Education Futures explores a New Paradigm in human capital development, fueled by globalization, the rise of innovative knowledge societies, and driven by exponential, accelerating change. Education Futures is owned and published by Education Futures LLC.