That’s hard to say five times fast. I just came across Tracy Sheridan’s blog, “The Long Blonde Tail,” but I’m happy I did. From September 2007 to January 2008 she posted several concise summaries of many of the Singularity Summit 2007 presentations. I attended that conference (and the one prior) and I took lots notes but I wasn’t doing much writing at the time and we were packing for a big move. Thus, my notes have been temporarily misplaced (lost forever).
It’s great to have short summaries of the event, so I recommend checking out her blog if you didn’t attend. You can also view all the recorded presentations from the event here. The SIAI website has evolved nicely over the last couple of years, no doubt thanks to the good work of Tyler Emerson with a wealth of resources and content available now. Go check it out.
The term “Singularity“ has a lot of baggage, but it’s not a topic anyone who thinks about the future of technology and humanity can reasonably avoid. IMO, if it’s not the central concept, it’s at least the underlying meme of a majority (maybe 65%) of the medium-term to long-term forecasting work that is happening today (outside of corporate foresight / environmental futures work). I can’t back that up – just my belief. Then again, I’m pretty familiar with the general concepts and many of the common issues associated with the Singularity (actually, there are several different notions of what consistutes “The Singularity” – the two most common being Vinge’s definition and Kurzweil’s definition), so I am probably falling prey to the availability heuristic here.
On that 65%…. please disagree if you do, and if you have any data to back it up, even better!
