H+ Magazine has a report by Ben Goertzel on the Fourth Conference on Artificial General Intelligence.
… This was the largest AGI conference yet, with more than 200 people attending, and it had a markedly different tone from the prior conferences in the series. A number of participants noted that there was less of an out-of-the-mainstream, wild-eyed maverick feel to the proceedings, and more of a sense of “business as usual” or “normal science” – a sense in the air that AGI is obviously an important, feasible R&D area to be working on, albeit a bit “cutting-edge” compared to the majority of (more narrowly specialized) AI R&D. …
Videos of the conference talks, including the workshops and tutorials, will be posted by Google during the next months, and linked from the conference website. …
Goertzel’s report provides links to PDFs of the slides of twelve presentations, including “The Economics of Singularity” by former Foresight President J. Storrs Hall, which seems to continue the theme of his March 2009 Nanodot post “Early Retirement“. The future could indeed by wonderful, if we have the foresight to get from here to there. It was interesting to see that some of the talks listed focused on Open Source and Crowd Sourcing as ways to develop AGI.
