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 [...]

From KurzweilAI.net: Abstracts and PowerPoints are now available online for the Artificial General Intelligence Research Institute’s (AGIRI) first workshop, May 20-21. The workshop looked at breaking AI technologies out of specific, task-oriented functions into a more general form. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) development takes a transdisciplinary, systems-oriented design perspective with the ultimate goal of creating [...]

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 [...]

Victoria News recently published an interesting article on Singularitarians in Canada whcih compared Singularitarianism with religion: At first blush, Singularitarianism may seem like a religion and has even earned from critics the label “Rapture of the Nerds.” But Singularitarianism differs from religion in one crucial aspect: its belief doesn’t depend on a supernatural power influencing [...]

In an audio podcast, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Director of the Singularity Institute for Artifical Intelligence, talks about what will happen if and when we make machines that are smarter than we are: Link to NeoFiles Web site.