Happy birthday Max Ernst
(All his paintings: http://www.scaruffi.com/monument/museums/ernst/index.html )
An Interdisciplinary Evening on Body
Jan 17 @ Stanford: SMMMASH 5 - Body
(Stanford Multidisciplinary Multimedia Meeting of Arts, Science and Humanities)
Panelists and exhibiting artists: http://www.slideshare.net/scaruffi/smmmash-5-body
My introduction to “Body”: http://www.slideshare.net/scaruffi/introduction-to-body-for-smmmash
Program, interviews, reading material, etc: http://www.scaruffi.com/stanford/tour2012.html
Catalog of the Art Exhibit: http://www.scaruffi.com/stanford/artex5.pdf
Photos and videos: http://www.scaruffi.com/stanford/tour5/index.html
Videos:
- Piero Scaruffi introducing the speakers http://youtu.be/pF9n_NS-foA
- Shelly Xie’s sand-animated video “The Moving Hands” http://youtu.be/q7i18UkHqe4
- Ben Burke’s kinetic sculpture “Every Body Needs Some Body” http://youtu.be/SHR9xFTHrzw
- Tamara Albaitis’ sculptural sound costume “Armor” http://youtu.be/Xgm7MTF4Cn0
- Cory Clinton’s installation “Art On the Body” http://youtu.be/zF56xWE47Zg
- Robert Edgar’s interactive installation “Eye Mask” http://youtu.be/-B5H2uLwwQA
- North-Indian classical dancer Antara Bhardwaj (Chitresh Das Dance company) http://youtu.be/MownLs_dKAk
- Robot scientist Oussama Khatib (head of Stanford’s Robotics Lab) http://youtu.be/G_xecc1LAAU
- Contemporary music performer Sarah Cahill http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vx6cEPUtTOU
- Multimedia artist and inventor Ken Goldberg (UC Berkeley) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3fVhbEqVyk
LASER of January 2013 @ USF
Cultural historian Piero Scaruffi on “Roger Sperry and the Age of the Brain” https://vimeo.com/57492967 - Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/scaruffi/roger-sperry-and-the-age-of-the-brain
Meredith Tromble (San Francisco Art Institute) on her virtual installation “The Dream Vortex And Collaborative Process” https://vimeo.com/57492008
UC Berkeley psychologist Alison Gopnik on “The Philosophical Baby - What Children’s Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love and the Meaning of Life” https://vimeo.com/57483225 - Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/scaruffi/alison-gopnik-uc-berkeley-on-the-philosophical-baby
Computer graphics pioneer Alvy Ray Smith (PARC, Pixar, Lucasfilm, etc) on “A Biography of the Pixel”
Program: http://www.scaruffi.com/leonardo/jan2013.html
and the whole series at http://www.scaruffi.com/leonardo
Pale Blue Dot
Voyager’s image of planet Earth, taken on February 1st, 1990,known as the “pale blue dot”
Readings on the Singularity
Most of what i read on the Singularity is either trivial (written by people who obviously know very little about the history of technology, Artificial Intelligence, etc) or highly unscientific (pure speculation that is as good as any science-fiction novel). Here are some readings that i would recommend:
- Irving John Good: “Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine” (1964). This is the classic that created the whole field.
- Douglas Hofstadter: “A conversation with Einstein’s brain” (1981). Not directly related to the Singularity, but good inspirational read.
- Hans Moravec: “Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence” (1988), another classic.
- Vernon Vinge: “The Singularity” (1993). Vinge is the sci-fi writer who originally coined the term “singularity” in 1988.
- Nick Bostrom: “Are we living in a simulation?” (2003)
- David Chalmers: “The Singularity - A Philosophical Analysis” (2010). Chalmers is possibly my favorite living philosopher and specializes in Philosophy of Mind.
- Luke Muehlhauser and Anna Salamon” “Intelligence Explosion” (2012). The Singularity Institute’s stump speech.
- Jaron Lanier: “Singularity Is Just a Religion for Digital Geeks” (2010)
- Eliezer Yudkowsky (Singularity Institute) discussing the three main schools of thought (video)
- Jaron Lanier on the Singularity (video)
- IntelligenceExplosion.com (website)
- Friendly-AI.com (website)
- Singularity Institute (website)
- The Journal of Consciousness Studies’s double-issue Volume 19/7-8 that includes:
A timeline of A.I. http://www.scaruffi.com/mind/ai.html
A timeline of Cyberculture http://www.scaruffi.com/politics/hacker.html
This is from Jaron Lanier’s article:
“The answer is simply that computer scientists are human, and are as terrified by the human condition as anyone else. We, the technical elite, seek some way of thinking that gives us an answer to death, for instance. This helps explain the allure of a place like the Singularity University. The influential Silicon Valley institution preaches a story that goes like this: one day in the not-so-distant future, the Internet will suddenly coalesce into a super-intelligent A.I., infinitely smarter than any of us individually and all of us combined; it will become alive in the blink of an eye, and take over the world before humans even realize what’s happening… Some think the newly sentient Internet would then choose to kill us; others think it would be generous and digitize us the way Google is digitizing old books, so that we can live forever as algorithms inside the global brain. Yes, this sounds like many different science fiction movies. Yes, it sounds nutty when stated so bluntly. But these are ideas with tremendous currency in Silicon Valley; these are guiding principles, not just amusements, for many of the most influential technologists.”
