Singularity Summit 2012, discuss it here
How was it? Which speakers delivered according to expectations?
Which topics were left unresolved?
Were any topics resolved?
Whatever you have to say about it, say it here.
Suggestion: if you are going to comment, mention “I was there” just so we know who was or wasn’t.
My boyfriend Dilip and I were there. Everything I knew about the Singularity was written by Eliezer or Robin Hanson and everything Dilip knew about the Singularity was stuff I’d told him in the few days preceding the Summit. Dilip was really impressed by Kurzweil’s talk and went from being dismissive of the concept to wanting to learn more about it and considering it as a real possibility.
The Q&A after the talks were hit and miss- some of them were really interesting and others were the questioners monologuing.
We met a lot of cool people and skipped a bunch of talks due to conversations.
Dilip and I also got sold on doing a CFAR workshop.
After seeing Jaan’s presentation, I decided to use Prezi for all my future presentations because the software makes your talk like a cartoon or a movie instead of an outline of words.
Jimmy’s talk was by far the best of the Thiel 20 under 20 talks.
No topics were resolved. To the contrary, many topics were opened.
Attending conferences is more about meeting the people who attend conferences than about watching talks (which are recorded and can be watched later using less-valuable hours), so I stayed outside and talked to people during many of them. But I was glad I watched Jaan Tallinn’s, which was not only excellent, but also the subject and tone for valuable conversations later in the day. Robin Hanson’s talk was well presented, though I disagree with it (I think the sort of society of ems he describes would be inherently unstable in a way that isn’t survivable). Julia Galef and Luke Muehlhauser presented very well, though on topics I’m already pretty familiar with. Luke ended up signaling a whole lot of uncertainty (saying that it’s all open research problems) about singularity-related issues, even in a few cases where I feel we actually know quite a bit. Overall it was an excellent summit, well organized with top notch presenters and a top notch crowd. My only real complaint would be the food, which had entirely the wrong macronutrient composition.
It was good to finally meet you in person! I now have a face to attach to the Cambridge meetup e-mails.
Just so everyone knows, the talks will be going online at Fora.tv over the next week or so.
I’ve downloaded most Summit talks from archive.org as [ogg] audio files, and I’m kinda partial to listening to them podcast-style i.e. while i do other stuff… So, will there be audio versions of the talks? Or is there a way I can download the videos from fora.tv, do a quick audio rip, then upload the resulting .OGGs to the archive?
Why didn’t Eliezer give a talk?
I was there—I’m another one in the “didn’t watch talks because time was better spent meeting people, but glad I saw Robin Hanson’s and Jaan Tallinn’s talks” category. So most of this comment is about talking to people, not about the speakers.
Changed my mind on a couple of minor issues:
All the action in em-world being concentrated in a few city-like hotspots (from Hanson’s talk)
Making people smarter (e.g. through genetics) would advance brain-computer interfacing faster than other technologies such as AI
Things I still find questionable about Hanson’s em world vision: how long the assumptions would actually be valid for (after which he admits the model breaks down), and chances of meaty humans surviving and having property rights respected (to me there seem several reasons why em/human situation isn’t analogous to workers/retirees in current society).
Tallinn’s talk didn’t actually tell me anything new (except the idea about the depth-first search meaning most time is spent at the leaf nodes near where superintelligence emerges). I found his presentation style really enjoyable though—and it seemed to leave everyone buzzing and produced lots of opportunities for geeking about anthropic principles afterwards.
People I met mostly fell into three categories:
Business (investors and founders of tech startups)
People who live in the area and are just curious
The Less Wrong tribe, or people with that mindset—people either wanting to change the world or just with a love for big, important wild ideas
A good place to hang out was the [CFAR|http://appliedrationality.org/] table—it had chocolates, Anna Salamon, a flip chart with invitingly mysterious doodles and free copies of HPMoR(1-17) - so tended to attract good people. (An interesting suggestion emerged—there should be a flip chart and pens not just at the CFAR table but everywhere else as well).
I didn’t hear Kurzweil’s talk but many people seemed to feel he wasn’t saying anything they hadn’t heard from him before.
On the effective altruism front, out of the people I’d expect to, most had heard of [THINK|http://lesswrong.com/lw/dyj/the_high_impact_network_think_launching_now/] and were broadly positive about it. A theme that emerged a couple of times in discussions was the problem of “being too meta”—the tendency to over-strategize and not actually do anything (and cause others to lose interest).
As for the hard questions about how to evaluate xrisk orgs (and whether e.g. GiveWell would be competent at this task), and what I personally should be doing in my life to make the world better… no concrete answers. I very much got the impression that if anyone knew exactly how these things worked and what needed doing, it would already be being done—so that it’s up to me to figure something out and then go ahead and do it.
Next time I’ll see if I remember to print business cards.
(Working from notes and memory...)
Melanie Mitchell’s talk was probably the best in terms of new things I learned. I’ve believed that metaphor isn’t a valuable way of transmitting information because of all the biases and poor thinking that often catch a ride. Her argument that partial pattern matching is a simple form of analogy was impressive, the output from her and Hofstadter’s copycat system, which tries to automatically deduce and apply patterns in short strings even more so. So I’m strongly updating away from the idea that metaphor is often harmful. (It may take a while for me to not reflexively profess it in certain situations though...)
Temple Grandin was a fiery speaker and I enjoyed her talk, even though I don’t feel I learned much from it.
I’m actually surprised at how good Pinker’s talk was. It felt like more than two-thirds of the words he said were on the slides behind him, but he didn’t trigger the negative feelings I usually feel when people read from their slides. Odd.
Robin’s talk was the best version of Robin’s ideas that I’ve ever seen.
Jaan Tallinn’s talk was very engaging, and the production value on the slide comics that he narrated were quirky and fun. At the same time, I can’t help but be extremely skeptical about parts of the metaphysical ideas he was espousing. But still make sure to watch it when it’s put up.
Of the four Thiel fellow’s, Laura Deming gave the most moving speech, though I wonder how much of it was me reacting to the antideathism message while nodding along in sympathy at the thought of recently losing a family member to death.
I was actually surprised at how much I enjoyed Ray Kurzweil’s talk. At the same time, I don’t actually remember much about it.
Carl Zimmer’s lecture on viruses was fascinating...and felt out of place at the summit. Fun fact I didn’t know: most viruses take over bacteria.
I liked most of the content, but I was oddly disappointed by Temple Grandin’s talk. Luke and Julia both gave very good presentations of familiar notions; Pinker and Mitchell and Norvig taught me things I didn’t already know. The second of the Thiel fellows’ talks was particularly good (lovely passionate antideathism combined with lovely passionate science enthusiasm!), and Robin’s talk was interesting and well-structured even for a reader of his blog (though I did need some of the clarifications that questioners afterwards solicited). I’m considering sending my dad a link to John Wilbanks’s talk once everything is online since it is related to his work and it was interesting.
I attended both days & enjoyed it quite a bit—more than I expected to. I’d be likely to fly to New York to attend next year if the speaker list looks equally interesting. There weren’t many unresolved topics in my mind because I talked a lot to other people during the event about things that occurred to me, and asked a lot of questions.
I most enjoyed Peter Norvig’s talk (largely about some recent Google AI projects) and Steven Pinker’s talk (reviewing downward-trending measures of human violence.) Those seemed pretty information-dense and covered topics that I didn’t know much about. I would recommend Jaan Tallinn’s talk to anyone who is a “light transhumanist” but hasn’t thought about the simulation argument very much—it was very well-done, but a lot of it was about ideas with which I have already made my peace.
I thought the level of professionalism and the quality of the talks reflected well on SIAI and CFAR. It was interesting to me that about half of the people I met during breaks had flown quite a way and paid quite some money, even though they weren’t tightly connected to the community and didn’t always have a ton of familiarity with all the typical transhumanist ideas—I expected that there would be less diversity in backgrounds.
I think people haven’t quite updated on the news value of what Norvig said in his talk this year. In 2007, he listed the specific components that were important in order to make progress in AGI. This year, he opened his talk by saying that substantial progress has been made towards 5⁄6 of those components. http://singularitysummit.com/the-history-and-future-of-technological-change/ is the 2007 talk.
However, some of those goals are way easier than the others. Doing stuff online with lots of data is important but something that we can predictably do after investing enough resources. Probabilistic first-order logic and hierarchical representations are the parts that require lots and lots of insight, and progress on those two is far less impressive.
But Pinker wrote a whole (excellent, highly recommended) book about that—was there anything new?
Sure, but I didn’t read it! If I had to guess I doubt that much of it was new.
I experienced almost none of the Summit, because I had my ear glued to a phone the whole time.
But, people tell me it was the most well-organized and professionally presented Summit yet, probably because we got e2k involved.
People seemed enthusiastic about my own talk, which is nice because I had almost no time to prepare and was literally reading from notes on the podium most of the time. Many people didn’t even notice I was reading from notes, somehow.
And yes, I got Eliezer’s permission to steal my conclusion from The Human Importance of the Intelligence Explosion.
It’s good to see you guys outsourcing stuff like event management that isn’t covered by your core competencies.
Aww, I’m sorry you didn’t get to enjoy the Summit, Luke. :(