Sunday 12 May 2013

Singularity Hypotheses: A Scientific and Philosophical Assessment

Yesterday I attended the presentation given by Amnon Eden and David Pearce at Birbeck hosted by The London Futurists.


The initial part of the presentation, given by Amnon, a lecturer in Computer Studies at The University of Essex, was a review of the book, a collection of academic essays regarding what the singularity is and the current state of research into the subject. It was an interesting talk, especially one of the criticisms written by Eric Chaisson from Harvard. The talk was mostly regarding the machine aspect of the singularity, and he showed this video of a DARPA experiment:


The second part of the talk, by David Pearce, was about the consequences of enhancing human intelligence and that trying to enhance machine intelligence may be flawed by the inability to overcome the binding problem. This is where our brains take sensory input, shapes, textures, colour, etc., and create an inner representation of the outside world, something that is a fundamental part of consciousness but is difficult to program into a machine.

The presentation was very good and the Q&A lively, as usual, but marred somewhat by the heating in the basement, which was oppressive.

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