h+ Magazine

Singularity Institute’s Executive Director Luke Muehlhauser interviews AGI researcher (and Humanity+ Magazine Chief Editor, and Humanity+ Vice Chairman) Ben Goertzel on the nature and risks of AGI.

Ben Goertzel interviews Adam Ford about the upcoming Humanity+ @Melbourne (May 5-6 2012), which will feature Aubrey de Grey, Natasha Vita-More, Stelarc and many more inspiring speakers.

Artificial intelligence systems and affective technologies are making interaction with devices increasingly intuitive. A future is taking shape where our devices are coming to life and take on new functions as companions, confidants and friends.

As computers begin to reach a human level of intelligence, some consideration must be given as to their concept of ethics. Appropriately aligning moral values will mean the difference between a contributing member of society and a sociopath.

“Involuntary friendliness” is censorship of consciousness akin to removing all the unfriendly words from the dictionary, making it impossible to express unfriendly ideas, which is a premise of language control proposed in the book “1984″.

in the second half of 2011, I started taking opinion polls concerning the rise of massively intelligent machines (“artilects”), by creating questionnaires. This essay reports on the results of the third such poll.

24 talks from the recent Singularity Summit conference in New York City are online at the SingularitySummits YouTube channel. Topics include robotics, economics, technology, artificial intelligence, and more.

DARPA, the Pentagon’s advanced concepts think-tank, is looking to take propaganda to the next level and they’re hoping to do so by controlling the very way their targets perceive and interpret the flow of incoming information. The Pentagon believes that by engaging in ‘narrative control’ they can alter an individual’s grasp on reality and the way in which they evaluate current events. Simply put, DARPA is looking to shape minds with stories.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) recently announced the 100 Year Starship Study, an effort to encourage long-term thinking about the realistic prospects of interstellar travel, specifically with the goal of devising a workable mission-plan within the next century. This bold call to action is exciting, but let us consider the more plausible scenarios under which such a venture might eventually occur.

The human brain is a massively parallel processor — each of its 100 billion-plus neurons is processing data all the time, and responding if appropriate. By contrast, today’s default computer architecture is highly serial — our processors operate, by and large, one step at a time. Certain types of operations that are slow for brain cells are extremely fast for today’s computer processors, enabling our computers to do a lot of amazing things in spite of their serial architecture.

Ben Goertzel converses with Hugo de Garis on his transhumanist argument for the reality of a Creator.