Eurisko stood for perhaps two decades as the most advanced AI ever created. And then Douglas Lenat abandoned it, decades ahead of the rest of us in the insight that recursive self-improvement is a mirage, there are no short cuts.

"A lack of concrete AGI projects is not what worries me, it's the lack of concrete plans on how to keep these safe that worries me. A massive legion is being assembled at the gate, and the best response we have come up with is an all-star debate team."

This is a summary for the collected results of the SL4 readership survey carried out in September 2006.

Reasons why general AI may be accomplished, with effective, diligent effort, within 10 to 30 years.

J. Andrew Rogers' argument against add-on Friendliness (the self-modeling Gödel problem).

If I found myself waking up in a world where magic worked - a world where a few people could, by virtue of their knowledge, heal the sick or build castles in the air - I would study sorcery. Finding themselves in this world, why do so few study science?

If "The Matrix" is a transhumanist action movie, then "Open Your Eyes" is a transhumanist psychological thriller.

This isn't the world you see in books and TV shows; those worlds obey the law of dramatic unity, where it takes an important cause to have an important effect and the main character is never killed by a completely unrelated truck halfway through the novel

Any group of people who have something in common, and who have their own mailing list, will naturally tend to form a clique unless specific steps are taken to avoid it.

Even among those who understand what is at stake, it seems that the most common reaction is to sit back and cheer the Singularity Institute on, the way one might cheer for a football team - passively.

The Singularity is about smartness, not technology, and the second you build something smarter than you, everything we know flies out the window.

An introduction to Shannon information and Shannon entropy