Singularity Summit Opens

I'm sitting in the front row of Stanford University's Memorial Auditorium watching client Ray Kurzweil open the Singularity Summit, as the event's keynote speaker.

Major kudos to Tyler Emerson, Director of the Singularity Institute, who led this effort in conjunction with Kurzweil. Not only has he been fabulous to work with, but he -- together with his team -- has managed to pull this off without a glitch. No small task, with 1,800+ seats filled, and another 1,000 on the wait list.

I'm not the only one who recognizes his efforts.

Ray, known for his work documenting and calculating accelerating change and exponential growth, gives examples of this acceleration and paradigm shifts, referencing an amusing graph that shows the countdown to the Singularity.

Ray on stage next to Hofstadter prior to the keynote.

We're now talking about the fifth paradigm -- Moore's Law -- which we're all familiar with, as he shows us the growth of and from microprocessors, cell phones, supercomputers, even transistors.

Brain scanning is growing in resolution and the amount of data on the brain is doubling. He asks, "Are we smart enough to understand our own intelligence? Are we perhaps below that threshold?" Once we can understand them, we can simulate them.

He talks about the ways the brain differs from a conventional computer.
--very few cycles to make decisions
--the brain is self organizing at every level
--there's a great deal of stochastic (randon within controlled constraints) process in every aspect
--information storage is holographic in its properties

A key point about the complexity of the brain, is that its at a complexity level we can manage. We have already created simulations - 20 regions out of several hundred of the brain.

He then moves to pattern recognition, which I'm somewhat familiar with from my speech recognition days. The bulk of human intelligence is based on pattern recognition: the quintessential example of self-organization.

He shows a demonstration of a translation system from English to German and French. The accuracy continues to improve. While we're software complexity and performance is improving, and GA's have become more capable, evolving the means of evolving, its still clumsy and unreliable.

Having said that, dencentralized self-organizing systems are inherently stable. The downtime for the Internet for the last decade is zero seconds.

The speaker line-up is remarkable. Think about an all day discussion with this many innovators in the same room, all on one stage at the same time.

Am I the only one who notices the amusing contrast of Cory Doctorow on stage with an open laptop saturated with colorful stickers and a neighboring speaker in a suit and a tie? Gotta love it and we all are.

Tag: Singularity Summit
Tag: Ray Kurzweil