Transvision
2003 Panel
SUNDAY June 29, 2003
9:00-10:30am
Linsly-Chittenden Hall, 62
High St., New Haven CT
The Future of the Body, Robots and the
Brain
Lanfranco
Aceti
Central Saint Martins
College of Art and Design
"Prosthesis'
Digital Aesthetic: The Integrated Technology of Human Extensions"
The
concepts of endotechnology and esotechnology, as described by
Baudrillard and Virilio, represent the transhuman body as an incongruous
cybernetic metastasis. But what if the categories used by these authors
to describe the cyber body are incongruous and imprecise?
Lanfranco
Aceti's research focuses on the avant-garde in fine art and digital
media. In his research endeavor he has analyzed how technology and cross
platform media are expressions of cutting edge creativity. He is working
on a theoretical structure for evolutionary media, which remodels the
philosophical and aesthetic approach to the human body. The human body,
therefore, is a medium: the world is not externalized but internalized.
In this context, cybernetic is an aesthetic tool which will redesign
humans according to new digital perceptions.
Matt Sandler
Partech International
Miles Lasater
Higher One
"When will robots have human-style
capabilities?"
Of the technologies being
discussed at the conference, the presenters believe that
super-intelligence is the mostly likely near-term, and important of
these potential technology advances. The onset of super-intelligence
seems to lead rapidly toward either utopian, or disastrous consequences
for humans, in large part by enabling advances in other technology
areas. Let’s call ‘the date of super-intelligence’ the date at
which a ‘human-fathered’ robot/computer first has full human-style
capabilities.While for most people, the perceived probability of ‘the
date of super-intelligence’ happening soon seems dismally low, there
are a number of published estimates (Moravec, Kurzweil , Bostrom, etc.
), of different forms, that place the likely ‘date of super
intelligence’ at a year ranging from 2020, to past 2300. The
presenters, Miles Laster and Matt Sandler, have collated and
cross-compared a number of these estimates, as well as built some of
their own. They will present summarized findings, exploring similarities
and differences in estimation approaches. They will also briefly present
current research into a new estimation approach that, when completed,
will hopefully be far more convincing then the existing range of
methodologies.
Miles Lasater is founder of
Higher One, a web-based financial services firm, and of the Yale
Entrepreneurial Society. He holds a bachelors in computer science from
Yale and has been interested in AI and the future of technology since
reading Minsky and Asimov as a ten-year old. You can read his blog
online at mileslasater.com.
Matt Sandler is with Partech
International. Partech is a venture capital firm managing $850 million,
operating out of San Francisco and Paris. Matt has been involved with
two of Partech’s investments in AI technology, including Inquira (an
NLP company), and Pertinence (a data-mining company). Matt was
psycho-biology and economics double major at Yale University. Like
Miles, Matt has been interested in the intersection of philosophy,
biology, and computers from a young age.
