Topic: The Future
Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Dr. Frank Wilchen, Nobel laureate and professor at MIT, about his latest book, "Lightness of Being," and how the recently activated Large Hadron Collider might confirm or dispel some of his most recent theories.
The Singularity is near; it will arrive in 10, 50, or 100 years depending on whom you talk to. Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google, examines the value of expertise in predicting the future, and discusses his thoughts on artificial general intelligence, based on his past experiences at NASA and current work with Google.
Brian Greene is well known for writing about our universe. Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Greene about his latest book "Icarus at the Edge of Time," and asks him why it is an entirely different book than we are used to.
Do you appreciate when someone brings a fresh perspective to a complex and daunting issue? Well can you imagine an issue more impenetrable or discouraging then the Singularity? From the "How Far are We from Advanced AI?" session of the 2007 Singularity Summit, Paul Saffo offers some new advice. He recommends that we find some poets and novelists and whisper in their ears about this stuff. Then hopefully they will help shape what the Singularity should be, rather than what we hope it will not be.
Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with author Greg Bear, about his latest book, "The City at the End of Time."
If you think that Sun Microsystems is that Java company, then you've a lot of news to catch up on. Charles Nutter, co-lead on the JRuby project at Sun, gives a quick round-up of a plethora of initiatives that Sun is working on, for the individual open source developer and the little start-up guy, besides bringing Ruby to the enterprise.
Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Michael Meyer, author of "The Last Days of Old Beijing," about the transformation of a city.
"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge." That is the goal of Wikipedia's creator, Jimmy Wales. He has set his sights on Google and the other corporate Search Engines with his new project "Wikia," a personal search engine-builder.
"Nine years to the Singularity, if we really, really, try," says Dr. Ben Goertzel, chief science officer and acting CEO of Novamente. Is this really possible? Dr. Goertzel believes the path to the development of Artificial General Intelligence - a real thinking machine with human level intelligence and beyond - can be accelerated through the use of virtual worlds as incubators for nascent artificial intelligence systems.
Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with AgResearch's Dr. Ian Boddy, about the contribution of livestock to global warming and what their biotech research center is doing about it.
