Wednesday, August 18, 2010

ASIM 2010 Conference, Advancing Substrate-Independent Minds


About 30 persons attended the ASIM 2010 Conference, Advancing Substrate-Independent Minds, satellite to the Singularity Summit 2010, San Francisco, August 16-17th. Besides the participants in San Francisco, about 25 remote participants attended online in Teleplace. The two main organizers Randal A. Koene and Suzanne Gildert appear in the image above (right screen).

The interactive live streaming of the ASIM 2010 Conference has been covered by KurzweilAI News (TOP STORY of today): Advancing Substrate-Independent Minds conference to be streamed live. I think this has been a really excellent mixed-reality event (see below).

Previously the subject of the conference had been described by KurzweilAI as: "What might brains and minds look like in the future? It can be difficult to manage and organize ideas from many highly specialized fields of expertise that must necessarily converge to answer this intriguing question. Not only must one consider the areas of brain imaging, neuroscience, and cognitive psychology, but also artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, biotechnology, computational hardware architectures, and philosophy.

In the past, the transferal of minds into computer-based systems has been rather vaguely referred to as “uploading.” However, those hoping to advance this multidisciplinary field of research prefer to use the term Advancing Substrate Independent Minds (ASIM), to emphasize a more scientific, and less science-fiction approach to creating emulations of human brains in non-biological substrates. The term ASIM captures the fact that there are several ways in which hardware and software may be used to run algorithms that mimic the human brain, and that there are many different approaches that can be used to realize this end goal. On May 22, 2010, carboncopies was born in an effort to unite the disparate areas of research contributing to ASIM...
"

Note: the term ASIM provides some plausible deniability to serious scientists, which is very useful. But I am not a serious scientist, and I think I will continue to use the good old term Mind Uploading. It is deliciously retro with a flavor of the wild, visionary, irresponsible and unPC transhumanism of the 90s. I am persuaded that future science and technology will permit achieving our wildest dreams, including mind uploading. In the meantime, the ASIM project will contribute to advancing step by step and developing enabling technologies.

The ASIM 2010 Conference featured 7 talks followed by lively discussions:

ASIM 2010 Conference, Advancing Substrate-Independent Minds, Day 1, with pictures and videos

Introduction to Advancing Substrate-Independent Minds, by Randal A. Koene
Computational complexity, by Suzanne Gildert
Advanced Tools – Synthetic biology, Nanotechnology, etc., by Mark Hamalainen
Preservation & large-scale high-resolution structural analysis, by Ken Hayworth (talk given via Teleplace)

ASIM 2010 Conference, Advancing Substrate-Independent Minds, Day 2, with pictures and videos

Fundamental Issues – Resolution & Scale, “Me” Programs, by Randal A. Koene
Actionable Approaches – ASIM Now, by Peter Passaro (talk given via Teleplace)
ASIM in Context – Ongoing Advances in neuroprosthetics, AGI, Cyber-augmentation, embodiment, VR, etc., by Monica Anderson

Remote participants in Teleplace were able to follow the talks via interactive video streaming, ask questions to the speakers, and contribute to the discussion. Two speakers (Peter Passaro on Day 2 and Ken Hayworth on Day 1) gave their talks via Teleplace. After attending both days of the conference remotely in Teleplace, I am very happy with the performance of the Teleplace system as a means to open up conferences to a global remote audience in “mixed reality”, with crisp video and audio (after properly setting up the microphones) and deep interactivity for all participants. I have participated in ASIM 2010 from the middle of nowhere in Central Europe, with a 3G phone link to the Internet and a very weak signal (in other words, my current Internet connection is VERY slow). Even with this poor connection, I have been able to participate in ASIM 2010 without any problem. There are, of course, special problems to deal with in mixed reality events. For example, in the first half of Day 2 remote participants could not hear well the on-site participants far from the microphone. In future events, we will use cordless microphones to give to on-site participants when they want to say something. In this case, the problem was solved by asking on-site participants to go to the microphone to comment and ask questions. Mixed reality via the professional and social collaboration platform Teleplace permits merging on-site and remote participants in one virtual group, and it is the best way to open up a conference to remote participants that I have seen. The 2-way video and audio link enables each participant, on-site or remote, to be seen and heard by all other participants, on-site or remote.

3 comments:

  1. Part of the chat-screen interaction following the second night's first presentation was captured as follows; more at:

    http://www.terasemcentral.org/snitz/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=74)

    Comment By Fred & Linda Chamberlain (22:53 Today) Individual mindfiles would be an overlay on the generic person, wouldn't they? Then, as long as you're satisfied that "it's me" from experiencing the feedback of your own mindfiles, you could "jump" to a different and more powerful generic (person) platform whenever you wished, which you'd want to do every year, just like we now run out and get a new desktop whenever we're unhappy with current hardware?

    Comment By williamweb (22:56 Today) Resolution need is highest for individual instantiation and lower for developing a template.

    Comment By amara (22:57 Today) What is the purpose of a template?

    Comment By Giulio Prisco (22:57 Today) Great suggestion!

    Comment By Giulio Prisco (22:57 Today) Lets do that

    Comment By amara (23:04 Today) What is a "me program"?

    Comment By Peter Passaro (23:04 Today) It doesn't have a 'brain' :)

    Comment By williamweb (23:04 Today) LOL ganglia instead

    Comment By samfreund (23:04 Today) Whether or not it's useful for getting to a human brain, it seems like it's a useful exercise if nothing else.

    Comment By Fred & Linda Chamberlain (23:06 Today) If you can create a generic person who is intellectually competent and self-conscious, would it not be possible, as if that person were an amnesia victim, to hand him or her a file and say, 'Here's who you are!" and then you *know* who you are and can discover more about that, plus modify your personality characteristics as if you were using a graphic equalizer? How much more do you need to know about "who you are"?

    Comment By randal a koene (23:07 Today) Audience: Yes it is a sensible way

    Comment By randal a koene (23:07 Today) Example: If you could get all the information from shakespere you could make a virtual shakespere

    Comment By williamweb (23:08 Today) You could do an expert system on how to write a shakespearean play.

    Comment By randal a koene (23:08 Today) David Hanson says that this is what they are doing with the robots, but they are still gross cognitive sketches of the real people

    Comment By amara (23:09 Today) All the brain's a stage....

    Comment By williamweb (23:09 Today) Yes Amara.

    Comment By amara (23:09 Today) And we avatars are but petty players...

    Comment By randal a koene (23:09 Today) Argument about Bainbridge/Rothblatt uploading and whether it will work

    Comment By williamweb (23:09 Today) Silence

    Comment By amara (23:10 Today) GIGO

    Comment By williamweb (23:10 Today) Yes

    Comment By Giulio Prisco (23:10 Today) GIGO????

    Comment By randal a koene (23:10 Today) Shane Legg: There is a nature versus nurture problem

    Comment By williamweb (23:11 Today) Kurzweil can do a rough upload of his father but it is a digital facsimile and really a limted "expert system"

    Comment By Giulio Prisco (23:12 Today) I disagree - it would not be enough NOT because of individual differences, but because the info in the lifelog would be far too little with current lifelogging tech

    Comment By williamweb (23:12 Today) Garbage In Garbage Out = GIGO

    Comment By Giulio Prisco (23:12 Today) !!!

    Comment By williamweb (23:13 Today) Lifelogging is so insufficent that it is GIGO.

    Comment By randal a koene (23:19 Today) Audience question: Asking for clarification about what a 'me' program is

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  2. Thanks Fred. Mo own opinion on mindfiles and "me programs" is similar to yours as outlined in your first comment in the thread: a me-program is a generic firmware and OS for a mindfile.

    I just finished uploading all videos to blip.tv, see the links in the blog post.

    ReplyDelete