I’m on a flight to Minneapolis to speak at MIMA Summit 09 right now and taking this time to reflect on the information I heard yesterday at day 1 of the Singularity Summit in NYC #ss09.
The 92^nd Street Y in New York was full of people I don’t often meet, several with long beards, many brilliant people, and some, a little over the edge.

The first session I attended on Quantum Computing: What It Is, What It Is Not, What We Have Yet to learn, where Michael Nielsen described Quantum Computing in 10 minutes, gave me the impression Quantum Computing is Boolean Algebra and Logic gates taken to the 3^rd dimension. Michael Nielsen pointed that he can describe what Quantum Computing is and does, how it works, but can’t tell you why it works, nor can anyone else.  He went on to describe simple AND, OR, NOT gates portray 2 conditions, the simplest Quantum gate can encompass 8 conditions.  I can imagine a situation in life where the answer isn’t “yes” or “no” or something is “happening” or “not happening”.  The big question is how does Michel Nielsen’s talk about Quantum Computing tie into The Singularity?

The answer is, of course, scientists want to develop artificial intelligence that can think for itself (this is one aspect of The Singularity) – and do that – Quantum Computing is needed – but my sense is, that today, Quantum Computing is still far from realizing AI as the logic gates that are able to be constructed, and the software that runs on them are not yet capable of mimicking human intelligence (though a prediction of 2029 is being heralded by Ray Kurzweil, of Kurzweil Technologies (and the spiritual founder of The Singularity Movement).   On the other hand, in a later session, not directly related to this one, AI is already present in certain applications that we commonly use, but aren’t sentient, yet.

The next session, DNA: Not Merely the Secret of Life, by Ned Seeman of New York University, showed some fascinating work being done now to build synthetic DNA (PX DNA) that mimics structures we have within our own DNA.  In many cases, the way this is done, is to cut DNA strands at certain angles – precisely, and then match up another strand of DNA with the same angle cut – this reminds me of carpentry, and perhaps, architecture.  It also reminds me that life, and I take this out of the DNA realm, is often determined by the “connections” we make, but in life, as in DNA, it’s all in the “angle” cut.  In other cases, building synthetic DNA strands requires a bit of “scaffolding” or other strands that can be constructed to hold what you want to bind together, and Nanorobotics has emerged to help build and activate synthetic strands of DNA.  The popular consensus is programming Nanotechnology that would repair human beings – or extend their lives, is still 20-40 years ahead despite any hype to the contrary.

I suppose if we merged Quantum Computing with DNA we get the idea of a 2-Dimentional DNA structure becoming 3 Dimensional and having the intelligence and sentience to rebuild itself – which, again, is part of the Singularity.

Next, Jurgen Schmidhuber from IDSIA, gave a fascinating presentation on Compression Progress: The Algorithmic Principle behind Curiosity, Creativity, Art, Science, Music and Jokes.  I liked Jurgen’s presentation because it gave me ideas about why information is interesting or valued, and when it’s not valued as much (a commodity).   According to Schmidhuber – it’s about compressing information – we, as human beings, take in information all the time, but unless we can compress and encode it in way that saves data (that makes that information, or vision) it’s not viewed as interesting to most people.  I imagined that my favorite painter, Paul Cezanne, found his own way to encode nature, and the landscape he so loved, in the south of France – but if another person copies that approach, there’s no additional “encoding” that goes on – and it’s not valued as much, or at all, even if the work is technically as good or superior to what Cezanne did.  You can find a million other examples of that same thing – and it all comes down to Compressing information, creating some new version, and adding value to society, and the world – that makes something “memorable”.  In a way, you can view Art in Museums as a reflection, or history of “novel compressions” of data that society values and learns from, today.

I didn’t care for Stephen Wolfram’s Conversation on the Singularity – maybe I’m more familiar with Wolfram Alpha and didn’t find anything Wolfram said to be interesting (or to put it another way, he had not compressed what he had to say to the audience in a way that I found novel or new – but that’s just me).

David Chalmers, or was it Marcus Hutter, from the Australian National University spoke about Simulation and the Singularity and I thought, made a good point that once society is able to “compress” information it becomes usable in a wide variety of ways and that it’s important in the evolution of human artificial intelligence to what he calls “superintelligence”.   To be honest, there was so much good information that was being discussed; I find it now, hard to remember exactly who said, what, in certain instances.

I thought William Dickens, from Northwestern University, who spoke on Cognitive Ability: Past and Future Enhancement and Implications – gave a great review of what we’ve learnt from IQ tests over the last 50 years.  William explained how scores in Math haven’t changed much, but those tests that measure the ability to do “spot” thinking and “improvising” have, by as much as 20%.  Why didn’t our skills, as a world society, independent of what country was being examined, change much for Math?  The answer seems to be, it didn’t need to – we have pocket calculators, we now have Google to help us figure out things – so we don’t really “need” to develop our intelligence, perhaps, in ways that we might ideally, want to.

William Dickens goes on to explain positive feedback loops that impact how we perform – initial experiences that are reinforced by additional positive experiences that then become a dynamic, may be a way to explain growth in certain intelligences and success of one individual over another.  Another point he made was that intelligence is largely a function of the environment in conjunction with genes, that you can take a person with lower intelligence, put them in better family, and there will be IQ gains – but he also pointed out – the gains are usually lost quickly, once the child leaves the supportive situation –and that led me to some profound thoughts about what society ought to provide, or what we ought to provide, that we don’t, that supports positive feedback loops and allows gains we make to be retained throughout our lives.

The last speaker of the day, Ray Kurzweil, didn’t actually inspire me – though he’s the founder of the Singularity movement by the books he’s written – though he predicted “inflexion points” where progress accelerates rapidly, giving several examples, and that 2029, will heard true AI Intelligence – and he doesn’t think he’s too far off.

What do you think?