To: Jeffrey Epstein[jeevacation@gmail.com]
From: 
Sent: Mon 8/17/2009 5:22:32 PM
Subject: Singularity Summit and followup workshop

Jeffrey,

BTW I think I mentioned this to you before, but you may be interested in the Singularity Summit which is a conference in NY Oct 3-4

http://www.singularitysummit.com/

Also, there will be a small-scale workshop on Oct 5 and the morning of Oct 6, which will be restricted to the **speakers** at the Summit, plus perhaps a handful of others. If you have interest in attending all or part of this workshop, let me know; you'd be welcome. This might be more your speed than the discussion-oriented.... main conference as it will be "brilliant people only" and more

I'll be giving a talk on my AI and bioinformatics projects at the Summit, and there's at least some chance this will arouse some investor/donor interest ... who knows. Also, Dan Stoicescu, the guy I mentioned who funded Novamente for a while this year, *may* be at the Summit and follow-up discussions (though I can't be sure as he's been very elusive lately)....

Also, apart from the Summit, if you want to get together F2F that interval would be convenient for me as I'll be in NY anyway...

-- Ben

P.S.

I thought a moment more about your question of "why AGI can't get traction."

I think that once one AGI project achieves a sufficiently interesting result, then we'll all-of-a-sudden see AGI getting a *hell of a lot* of traction. But I think my project is maybe $250K-$6O0K and 2-3 years away from getting that kind of kick-ass result. This is what the project plan I sent you N months ago was about.

What is needed is for one AGI project (like mine ;-) to get funded consistently for a few years, so that a system doing basic integrated language/learning reasoning can be demonstrated. Then the world will pay attention and the funding will pour in from all sorts of sources.

And like I said, without my project being funded overall, what I can do is to do mathematical work to refine my design and theory, so that when the funding does come, the work will be smoother and smaller..

Ben Goertzel, PhD
CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC
<u>Director</u> of Research, SIAI