So I’ll post something about the Singularity Summit soon, but first I just wanted to talk a little about the ASIM-2010 conference that I helped organise along with Randal Koene.
The main idea of the conference was to hold a satellite workshop to the Singularity Summit, with the purpose of sparking discussion around the topics of Substrate Independent Minds. See the carboncopies website for more information on that! Ah, I love the format of blogging. I’m explaining what happened at a workshop without having introduced the idea of what the workshop was trying to achieve or what our new organisation actually *is*. Well, I promise that I’ll get round to explaining it soon, but until then it will have to be a shadowy unknown. The carboncopies website is also in the process of being filled with content, so I apologise if it is a little skeletal at the moment!
One interesting thing that we tried to do with the workshop was to combine a real life and a virtual space component. It was an interesting experience trying to bring together VR and IRL. In a way it was very fitting for a workshop based around the idea of substrate independent minds. Here we were somewhat along the way to substrate independent speakers! I am hoping that this will inspire more people to run workshops in this way, which will force the technology to improve.
I was very pleased too see so many people turning out. We had about 30 people in meatspace and about another 15 in virtual space on both days. Giulio Prisco has some nice write-up material about the workshops, including PICTURES and VIDEOS! Here are the links to his posts:
General overview
First day in detail
Second day in detail
For a first attempt, I don’t think that things went too badly! The technology wasn’t perfect, but we gave it a good try. The main problem was with the audio. Teleplace, the conferencing software we were using, works well when everyone in online with a headset and mic, there are no feedback problems. However, when you try and include an entire room as one attendee, it becomes a little more tricky.
This could be improved by either everyone in the room having headsets and mics, and then having a mixer which incorporated all the input into a single Teleplace attendee. The other way is that everyone in the room could also be logged into Teleplace with their own headsets and mics. *Make* that Singularity happen, ooh yeah! (/sarcasm)
Physics and cake 