Hugo de Garis interview - Part 1 (2010-10-09 005)

Interview with Hugo in Melbourne after the Singularity Summit Australia 2010, conducted by Aam A. Ford.


Bio: Prof. Dr. Hugo de Garis, 63, has lived in 7 countries. He recently retired from his role of Director of the Artificial Brain Lab (ABL) at Xiamen University, China, where he was building China's first artificial brain. He and his friend Prof. Dr. Ben Goertzel have just finished guest editing a special issue on artificial brains for Neurocomputing journal (December 2010), the first of its kind on the planet.

He continues to live in China, where his U.S. savings go 7 times further, given China's much lower cost of living. He spends his afternoons in his favorite (beautiful) park, and his nights in his apartment, intensively studying PhD-level pure math and mathematical physics to be able to write books on topics such as femtometer scale technology ("femtotech"), topological quantum computing (TQC), as well as other technical and sociopolitical themes.

He is the author of two books: The Artilect War: Cosmists vs. Terrans : A Bitter Controversy Concerning Whether Humanity Should Build Godlike Massively Intelligent Machines (2005) and Multis and Mono: What the Multicultured Can Teach the Monocultured: Towards the Creation of a Global State (2010). Both these books are concerned with the political consequences of future technologies.

He labels his new lifestyle "ARCing" (After-Retirement Careering), feeling freed from wage slavery, spending (probably) the remaining 30 years of his life pursuing with passion those deep and interesting topics that truly fascinate him, without having to waste huge amounts of time writing an endless stream of relatively unread, un-meaningful, short-horizon scientific papers or research grant proposals just to receive a salary. He feels liberated from all that, and can recommend ARCing to anyone with sufficient savings (i.e.. to take up "wage free careering in the third of life").

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Hugo de Garis
• Singularity Summit
• Australia
• interview
• Melbourne
• 2010
• artilect
• gigadeath
• cosmist
• cyborg
• terran
• Adam Ford
• kurzweil
• technological singularity
• pesimism
• accelerating returns
• robot
• artificial intelligence
• ai
• nanotech
• femtotech
• quantum computing
• topological
• technology

[TheRationalFuture]

These interviews were done last year (2010), there are some new ones that have recently been done and just need editing. 

[BeavisNacho]

What scale is beyond femto ??

nano, pico, femto .....

[TheRationalFuture]

@BeavisNacho atto? plank?

[Branstrom]

lol @ the last few seconds

[TheRationalFuture]

@Branstrom Whoops, it took a long time to find a room to interview Hugo. Tried the Melbourne Museum, got rejected, walked around with a massive cam in a big box with the stand all day it felt like. This was last year after the first singsum in australia.

[rememberwhite]

If someone is going to take down the human race by building robotic gods, why not have a nice guy like Hugo do it!

[D3ROXX]

I am afraid, but this man is dangerous !

[xavierpaquin]

I fell alseep listening to this yesterday... had the worst nightmares

[kazicimir]

is there a transcript of the interview available?

[bighands69]

I am not sure if his 2020 numbers stack up.

I think that he is to optimistic with the orange juice computing system. It will more than likely be the 2040 before that number is achieved in a discrete computational system.

[moonraven3]

Excellent interview! Too bad Hugo De Garis isn't getting as much media attention. I would like to see more news outlets interview this gentleman.

[dudesmcman]

i can totally picture him as a crazy red-eyed cyborg . . .

[dudesmcman]

i can totally picture him as a crazy red-eyed cyborg . . .

[rmeddy1]

I expect to see these thing (Artilects) to be more akin to beasts of burden than sapient in of themselves.

Just extensions of our will(ignoring P-Zombie issues)

much like a horse can allow us to run faster vicariously, these will help us compute faster but I don't see agency itself being there.

I'm not sure if this is better or worse than De Garis' scenario