Singularity Summit 08 Day 1

Today was the Emerging Tech Workshop component of the Singularity Summit, and I have to say I'm fairly disappointed. The venue certainly didn't help. While the Tech Museum of Innovation is an inspiring place, it's also full of exuberant (loud) kids, and that combined with the less than adequate sound system made concentrating on the speakers a challenge.

Still, it was certainly possible to pull some useful stuff out of it. It was great to hear Thomas Dietterich on the semantic web panel validate what I've been thinking about AI for a while, namely that we can't expect to have useful AI until it has an awareness of what's going on in the real world. That might seem obvious, but it appears many folks have been working simply on text manipulation and inference engines, which will only get us so far. He also mentioned OAuth, which I hadn't yet heard of, which allows users to give applications access to their data in a controlled manner.

The highlight of the robotics panel was clearly Bruce Hall's use of the phrase to "spinning dreidel of death" to describe Velodyne's laser vision system (LIDAR), used by many of the vehicles in the DARPA grand challenge. One fellow asked if anyone on the panel saw potential commercial application of some of the research work being done using rat brains to control robots, to which the panel answered a flat "no". That surprised me a bit. I was thinking folks in a robotics panel at a summit on the singularity would perhaps be a little more forward thinking.

Anyway, there were also guys presenting on their supposedly singularity-related companies, including Climos, m2mi and Piryx. These mostly felt like VC pitches. Interesting stuff for sure, but hardly what I was expecting. Where were the guys working on heads-up displays and neural interfaces, for instance? How about the guys from Mind Balance working on mind-controlled video games? I think these were the things the audience was clamoring for but didn't get.

Towards the Singularity...

One of the defining characteristics of this age is the notion of a technological singularity. Whether or not our civilization actually achieves such an event, there is surely little doubt that we are currently experiencing a period of time marked by incredibly rapid discovery and innovation. For some time I've been a fan of Ray Kurzweil, first for the musical instruments he makes, and secondly for his writing on futuristic themes. So I'm very excited to be attending The Singularity Summit at the end of October, an event at which I hope to meet some like-minded folks, and hopefully sharpen my vision with respect to what may come...

What are *you* afraid of?

I'll tell you what I'm afraid of. Patents. Software patents specifically.

This week I'll be attending the Business of Software conference in Boston, where folks are getting together to discuss all the gnarly difficulties associated with building software for money. Judging from the presentation topics people are worried about how to build software, how to market it and how to charge for it. Clearly these are all very worthwhile topics. I guess for myself, however, these are the least of my worries. I classify them as rational problems. You can try things, see what works and what doesn't, experiment, and move on. Easy.

But patents. Patents lurk around late at night, watching and waiting, ready to strike at the worst possible time. Patents are not rational. They're a problem I clearly don't understand. Richard Stallman himself will be speaking at BoS 2008, mostly on the evils of patents as applied to software. I'm already convinced of the evils, what I need now is a strategy to manage patent risk!