This is a report of my trip to the H+ Summit, June 12-13 2010 at the Harvard University Science Center in Cambridge, MA. The main purpose of this post is to avoid writing about uninteresting non-summit related parts of the trip in my posts about the summit itself. I felt the need to write about some of this, but didn’t want to clutter up the other posts.
There are some new features over on the right (well, I hadn’t mentioned them yet anyway). Google Latitude shows my current position at most times, and there’s a Google Calendar gadget to tell you what I’m doing. Please let me know if they’re not working.
I haven’t posted anything in a while. Part of this is, “If you don’t have anything awesome to say, don’t say anything at all”. But also I’ve been very busy. You can follow my day-to-day on Twitter, but here are some general things you might be interested in:
I’m working on a review of Moral Machines for the journal Minds and Machines. Wallach and Allen have a book-related blog. My deadline is like, today or something.
I had the chance to talk to Scaz about my research. It was awesome. I can’t post a transcript here due to my university’s ridiculous views on privacy and human research ethics, but I’ll probably talk about it soon.
I will be giving a guest lecture for the SCSU Philosophy Dept this coming Tuesday (March 10) at 3:15 PM. The topic is going to be robots, more specifically the inevitability of a robot uprising. Hope to see you there.
The folks who do Overcoming Bias have a new site called Less Wrong, which is reddit-てき. You should go there if only to check out the site design. It’s pretty neat. I post as thomblake.
EDIT: fixed date for SCSU talk
As some of you may have already heard, Christalee and I are now married. Hooray!
We got married in Verona, Italy this past week (September 23rd).
We’ll be having a wedding reception in probably about a month. Feel free to shower us with monetary gifts!
For those who don’t know, I’ll be presenting next week at ETHICOMP2008 at the University of Pavia in Mantua (Mantova) Italy.
My paper looks at CFAI and evaluates it as a basis for creating ethical robots. Punchline: CFAI is no good; virtue ethics is better.
I’ll post more about the paper soon.
It is about this time of year that I traditionally start to reflect on my life and where it’s going. It’s the beginning of July, and today is the holiday of “Birthday”, the time of year that we celebrate our coming into the world. The date for the holiday was chosen to logically break up the year, so that gift-giving holidays occur in the Winter and Summer, and consumption holidays occur in the Spring and Fall. This holiday was proposed some years ago by Isaac Schlueter, who coincidentally has his own birthday on the same day.
Isaac recently wrote a post reflecting on his experience as a programmer and the difficulty of becoming an expert. Apparently, it takes about 10,000 hours of practice to master anything.