We're seeking members.

The Group: Meets in San Diego about twice a month to talk about the common theme in the ideas listed above... the “?” at the center.

The Goal: Good conversation and maybe insights worth bringing back to your research or business plans or political career or...

The Tone: We're hoping for a small group (5 – 10 people) that works at least as well as “a really thoughtful grad student seminar”.

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The next meeting will be this Sunday (March 25, 2007) at 3PM with singularity flavored reading material with a possible follow up trip to a Vernor Vinge talk at 6PM if people are still game.

The reading for the 3PM meeting is

"Artificial Intelligence as a Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk"
www.singinst.org/ourresear...e-risk.pdf

It is an essay on the dangers and benefits of (succeeding at) building a general artificial intelligence. Of general theoretical interest is the discussion of the human reasoning biases that seem to lead many people to radically over estimate the degree to which they "understand intelligence".

Message me for more info :-)

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If you're trying to get a feel for the salon and wondering if coming is likely to jingle your bells, here are some keywords. We aren't shooting for exhaustive coverage of this stuff, what we're aimed at is the common theme running through it all...

Cognitive Science
Lakoff
Cosmides & Tooby
Philosophy of Science
Kuhn - “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”
Structuralism
Piaget
Artificial Intelligence
Hofstadter - “Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid”
Eric Baum - “Manifesto for an Evolutionary Economics of Intelligence”
Bayesian Probability
Boltzmann Networks
Mitchell - “CopyCat”
Wolfram
Cellular Automata
Automated Theorem Proving
The Singularity
Kurzweil
Vinge
Yudkowsky
Evolution
Goodwin - “How the Leopard Changed Its Spots”
Dennett - “Darwin's Dangerous Idea”
Autocatalytic Chemistry
Margulis - “Symbiosis in Cell Evolution”
Economics
Adam Smith
Political Economy
Jane Jacobs
Cliometrics
Asimov's “Psychohistory”