$100 off for Less Wrong: Singularity Summit 2011 on Oct 15 − 16 in New York
There’s still time left to register for the Singularity Summit in New York. But hurry because there are only a few weeks left!
Register now so you can meet Eliezer, AnnaSalamon, Lukeprog, and more! I’m particularly excited about several invited speakers, such as neuroscientist Christof Koch (who I’ve blogged about here) and author Sharon Bertsch McGrayne who recently published The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes’ Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy.
Register now and use the $100 off Less Wrong discount code: LW2011. Hope to see you next month in New York!
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| Ray Kurzweil | Eliezer Yudkowsky | Anna Salamon | Luke Muehlhauser |
PS—If you have a blog and you’d like to promote the Singularity Summit, I can make you a custom discount code. Email me at louie.helm@intelligence.org.
About the Singularity Summit:
New York, NY (Sept 23) - Over 700 scientists, engineers, businesspeople, and technologists for this year’s Singularity Summit—the world’s leading conference on emerging technologies. The event will be held October 15 & 16 at 92Y in New York.
The Summit will explore “big picture” questions such as the direction of the global economy, philosophy of mind, and the ethics of technological development. Twenty-five speakers will present including two professors of robotics, financial experts, a co-founder of Skype, a pioneer in regenerative medicine, scientists from the MIT Media Lab, a longevity expert, economist Tyler Cowen, cosmologist Max Tegmark, neuroscientist Christof Koch, and venture capitalist Peter Thiel.
The recent victory of IBM’s Watson supercomputer on the game show Jeopardy! will be the central theme of discussion, with a keynote by Jeopardy contestant and 74-time winner Ken Jennings.
Jennings surprised audiences around the world in 2004 when he won 74 continuous Jeopardy! matches, winning over $2,500,000 on a six-month streak. In February, Jennings went up against Watson in on a special exhibition match of Jeopardy!, and lost. In his keynote at Singularity Summit, Jennings will recount his experience on Jeopardy! and what it felt like to lose to a machine on the game show he otherwise dominated.
Ray Kurzweil, futurist and inventor, will be speak on the implications of the Watson victory. Dan Cerutti, who manages the commercialization of Watson at IBM, will speak on applying Watson to fields besides Jeopardy!, such as medicine. Stephen Wolfram, a pioneer in artificial intelligence, will speak on computation and the future of humanity.
What the? $100 discount code on a public blog? How does that make any se… oh, right. For humans. As you were.
Care to give your 50% confidence interval on how many registrants are using the above, “public”, discount code?
Eliezer’s talk is on Open Problems in Friendly Artificial Intelligence. People have been wanting something like that for ages.
Even at $485 I still wouldn’t be able to convince my family members to attend.
Weekend passes to an event like Comic-Con or Otakon usually run less than $100. Smaller fan conventions, such as Intervention also keep admissions prices below $100. NECSS, a seemingly similar event, charges $65 for full price tickets. What makes the Singularity Summit so much more expensive than all these other events?
Singularity Institute learns new things every year about cutting expenses from putting on a major conference, but we know enough that we’re now heading into the 6th annual Singularity Summit and can attract big-name speakers. Why does it cost more? There isn’t yet much corporate sponsorship or paid booths, as at Comic-Con, though we’re working on that as we go into the future. And we have higher profile speakers than Intervention or NECSS. But I certainly want to talk to the people who put together NECSS; thanks for providing the link.
Outside speculation, but surely some of the booths at Comic-con and the like have paid for the privilege of being there? In this way, the cost of entry is subsidised by vendors and stalls, I would suspect. The Singularity Summit, as far as I know, pays all of its presenters to be there, and has no vendors which might subsidise the costs.
The dealers’ room is a major profit center for conventions which have them; at ICON this year (I was a volunteer), dealers were charged $15, not for any extra space, but for any additional folding tables. Some dealers did pay up, so you can imagine what it must have cost to gain actual entry… (One of the old ICONers told me that when the university kicked ICON out one year, it lost so many tens of thousands of dollars in revenue, they immediately asked ICON back.)
Perhaps the Summit should have a dealer’s room with representatives from longevity supplement makers and wearable computing device companies, recruiters from AI-focused startups, etc.
Yes, I was at Otakon a few years ago and the dealer’s room spaces were something like $750 each—there were probably about 100 dealers and I think each had about 3 spaces on average. Also, $65 each for extra dealer’s badges for employees. That said, I believe the money from the dealer’s room mostly goes to cover the expense of having a dealer’s room.
But remember that fan conventions tend to run at cost, while the Singularity Summit is a source of revenue for SIAI.
The ticket price isn’t “$485”. The ticket price is “$100 off”, it says so in the post title.
“Off” as it is used here is a two-place predicate, taking a number as x and an implied price as y and reducing y by x to produce the new price.
“Off” has other meanings, but we can tell they’re not in use here because $100 is not a object with toggle-able states.
Conspicuously absent from the post is any mention of the actual ticket price. It’s an exercise in framing. Humans aren’t best described as having an objective preference for $485 instead of a ticket to the conference or vice versa. If the post had been a reminder of an old $485 ticket price, or announced the price as having risen from $385 or whatever to $485, it would have been less effective.
Sure, but that’s obviously not the problem for CronoDAS’s family members. Their problem is that it’s a big luxury purchase, not the equivalent of a nice meal out that is easier to justify.
My apologies for scoring points by making it look like you don’t know what “$100 off” means, by the way.
When I followed the link, the price without the discount was $585. With the $100 discount applied, it would be $485 a ticket.
I was stricken with a bad case of illusion of transparency. I was referring to the way the price was framed.
There should be a lot of people reading this who know better than me, but I thought that the Singularity Summit is what pays for many of SIAI’s activities.
Also, how many names of speakers at the SSummit do you recognize, and how many at NECSS? I don’t know if any of the famous people speak for free.
In addition to the other issues mentioned I also expect that there is much less demand elasticity for the singularity summit due to different demographics.
Will any of these talks be recorded and/or posted online?
History says yes
Thanks!
(Unless I shirk and watch every single one of these videos before I accomplish anything else....)
They will.
Yes
Who will be attending to this event? I will most likely be present on the Saturday October 15th program. It would be interesting to discuss some experimental hypothesis/concept in Statistical, Mathematical logic and psychophysics model I am currently constructing for strengthening machine vision/learning and perception(on the hobby side/ philosophical conjecture)- for the possible future application in Strong Ai.
The one I am now researching has to do with human perception(sensory) and memory; artificial intelligence would be an interesting topic to touch upon- given that machine “memory” and “computation” levels could well bring astonishing levels of intellect, automation capacity, projection, abstraction and reflexes; bringing about the idea that strong AI could never reach human intelligence, mental processes or behavior- (because our mental faculties are constructed in a way to only retain certain things from cognitive experience, forget certain feelings to maintain parallelism and project at a basic form with little to poor decision reasoning timeframe and large margins of errors); A machine mental faculty would vastly surpass and adjust/limit itself to interact from a programmed inter-dependancy level (in a sense, it would jump from absurdism(“A.I now”) into progressing ‘limited’ absolutism the moment it reaches human mental compatibility in terms of communication and abstraction.
You can attend for just 1 day for $350 ($290 off with the given discount code).
(For another 20 minutes.)