The Technological Singularity ― Managing the Journey

This volume contains a selection of authoritative essays exploring the

central questions raised by the conjectured technological singularity.

In informed yet jargon-free contributions written by active research

scientists, philosophers and sociologists, it goes beyond philosophical

discussion to provide a detailed account of the risks that the singularity

poses to human society and, perhaps most usefully, the possible actions

that society and technologists can take to manage the journey to any

singularity in a way that ensures a positive rather than a negative

impact on society. The discussions provide perspectives that cover technological,

political and business issues. The aim is to bring clarity and rigor

to the debate in a way that will inform and stimulate both experts and

interested general readers.

Victor Callaghan is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Essex where he founded the Robotics and Intelligent Environments research groups, publishing over 300 related articles. He is president of the Association for the Advancement of Intelligent Environments, director the Creative Science Foundation and a founding board member of Sapience, organizations which all study the impact of artificial intelligence on our futures.

James D. Miller is Associate Professor of Economics at Smith College. He has a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago and a law degree from Stanford. The author of the books Singularity Rising and Game Theory at Work, he is interested in how increases in human and artificial intelligences will influence the economy.

Roman V. Yampolskiy is a Tenured Associate Professor in the department of Computer Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Louisville. He is the founding and current director of the Cyber Security Lab and an author of many books including Artificial Superintelligence: a Futuristic Approach. Dr. Yampolskiy’s main areas of interest are Artificial Intelligence Safety and Cybersecurity

Stuart Armstrong is, an Alexander Tamas research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute, works on formal decision theory, general existential risk, the risks and possibilities of Artificial Intelligence (AI), how AIs can learn humane values, assessing expertise and predictions, and anthropic (self-locating) probability. His booklet “Smarter than Us: the rise of machine intelligence” lays out some the challenges in this area.