Last year I reported on the Singularity Summit at Stanford, which featured Raymond Kurzweil, Douglas Hofstadter, Bill McKibben and other thinkers discussing the future of artificial intelligence and its impact on humanity.
This year it's a two-day event and takes place in San Francisco on September 8th and 9th (it's also no longer free -- tickets are $50). I'm planning to attend and will report on it here, from a skeptical perspective, of course. Their featured speakers include roboticist Rodney Brooks, Google's Peter Norvig, and even a bioethicist, Wendell Wallach from Yale.
Link: Singularity Summit 2007: AI and the Future of Humanity.
Here is a related post by Bruce Klein: When will AI surpass human-level intelligence?
A rough poll says the singularity is due to arrive between 2030 and 2050. Better start preparing! I think that's optimistic, and it's kind of an ill-defined question anyway. I'm not sure you could ever measure such a thing definitively, at least not until the robots have enslaved us -- then I think you could say it's happened.
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