"Singularity or Bust" full documentary

Here's a summary of the video, written while watching it.

Summary

• A positive singularity is possible in about 10 years
• Three ways towards singularity: AI, Nano-technology and computer-brain interfaces
• The person we're following (Ben Goertzel) works with machine consciousness
• Doesn't follow a materialistic outlook on consciousness. He sees consciousness as the ground on which things are formed and different structures manifest consciousness in different ways. (For example, a human brains manifests consciousness in one way and a coin manifests it in another way.)
• Introduction of the second person we're following (Hugo de Garis), who works with Goertzel on the Conscious Robot Project.
• Apparently, there's a province in China that pours great amounts of money in computer science and software.
• de Garis is trying to tap into that money in order to kickstart a machine intelligence and robots in China and maybe the world.
• de Garis sees China as the next big culture, while America is growing stagnant and "fat"
• Goertzel sees artificial scientists as the big step towards a singularity
• 20 minutes in and we see their robot. It falls over when told to go right.
• Goertzel says building a "thinking machine" shouldn't be harder than creating the google search engine.
• The mind as pattern-recognition engine
• More robot. It walks a bit wobbly. They talk to the robot a little bit.
• The robot does a couple of dance moves and kicks a ball.
• Goertzel's motivation to do this research is lessening suffering, removing death, removing limitations of the human body.
• A brief explanation of how AI wouldn't have to be a copy of a human mind.
• Explanation of how a superhuman mind would lead to a rapid increase in technology and how humans won't be in control anymore.
• De Garis is more pessimistic than Goertzel. Foresees a great debate as the gap between human and machine intelligences closes.
• De Garis sees the worst scenario as the most probable. He foresees a violent conflict between humans who want super-powerful AI (he calls the AI artelects and the humans who want them cosmists) and those who don't want such a thing (which he calls terrans). He says he's glad he'll be dead before this global war happens.
• Goertzel thinks we can accurately predict the events leading up to a singularity, but not anything beyond that.
• The reason Goertzel works in AI is because it feels natural to him.
• The goal for Goertzel is going beyond the human condition.
• Before Goertzel had kids, he wanted to be immortal, but now he has kids, that drive has lessened.
• White text on a black background tells us de Garis' lab is dismantled and the Chinese government is reconsidering the profitability of the home robot.
• Goertzel continues working on robots.

After seeing the documentary, I'm a bit at a loss as to who the target audience is. For people who are new to the concept of AI or the singularity this probably isn't the best way to learn more and for people who are already familiar with those concepts, this documentary doesn't offer a lot of new insights. I also don't think it stands strongly enough as a human-interest piece.

The bits with the robot were kinda fun, but they didn't provide a lot of information. The robot didn't look like much more than a cleverbot with legs and since we're not told anything about the robot, I don't have a particular reason to assume it isn't just that.

..”problem solving" is largely, perhaps entirely, a matter of appropriate selection. Take, for instance, any popular book of problems and puzzles. Almost every one can be reduced to the form: out of a certain set, indicate one element. … It is, in fact, difficult to think of a problem, either playful or serious, that does not ultimately require an appropriate selection as necessary and sufficient for its solution.

It is also clear that many of the tests used for measuring “intelligence” are scored essentially according to the candidate’s power of appropriate selection. … Thus it is not impossible that what is commonly referred to as “intellectual power” may be equivalent to “power of appropriate selection”. Indeed, if a talking Black Box were to show high power of appropriate selection in such matters — so that, when given difficult problems it persistently gave correct answers — we could hardly deny that it was showing the ‘behavioral' equivalent of “high intelligence”.""