Skip to content
Oct 1 2009 / Aaron

Singularity Summit Time!

Christine & I arrived in New York this afternoon. We’re staying in the upper east-side of manhattan. Besides being NYC tourists, we’re here primarily to attend the Singularity Summit this weekend. I’m ridiculously excited to be attending. There is a roster of fascinating speakers (Ray Kurzweil, Aubrey De Grey, Anders Sandberg, Stephen Wolfram, David Chalmers, Eliezer Yudkowsky, & Ben Goertzel, and so on…).

I have not been to a conference of this type since 1999, when I attended the Extropy-4 Conference in Berekely. I had such an amazing experience at Extro-4. It will be very interesting to see what has changed in a decade. Certainly a lot of the big topics that were being discussed 10 years ago (like radical longevity, technological singularities, uploading (whole brain emualtion), seed AI, nanotechnology, and gene therapy) were very fringe and shocking ideas at the time. In the last 10 years, a lot of these ideas have moved much more into mainstream awareness.

For me it’s all about the big crazy ideas. Why the rest of the world spends so much time worrying about what to wear and which celebrities are dating each other is beyond me. This stuff is just way more interesting. Even if it all turns out to be nonsense (and surely some of it is, but I’m convinced most of it is solid), it is infinitely more interesting and rewarding to contemplate. I look forward to a solid weekend of mind-bending talks followed by schmoozing and discussing the rapture of the nerds over beers.

If I can be arsed, I will attempt to post notes on the best talks in the coming days.

One Comment

leave a comment
  1. bill / Oct 1 2009

    Quality time with nerds. You’ve needed this for a long time. Enjoy and may your mind be blown again and again.

Leave a Comment