Official videos from the Singularity Summit

He looks like he showed up at the last minute from a Renaissance Faire run by sadomasochists.

Right garment, wrong venue.

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I suspect that Tegmark is bright enough to have arrived on his own, given cosmology, physical law and a strict adherence to materialism.

What I want to know is how he became motivated to push for a positive Singularity. It seems to me that people who think that a Singularity is possible, or even likely, greatly outnumber people who think they ought to do something about it. (I used to wonder why most people are so apathetic in the face of such danger and opportunity, but maybe a better question is how the few people who are not became that way.)

Yup, I'd want to change that part.

There was a discussion at a dinner afterwards about what the C stood for.

It took far too long to remember, but "exactivist" was a popular alternative. (exact + ist, ex - activist, ex (as in x-risk) activist, and probably a few more that I forgot).

Can you be more specific?

Seriously Luke, slides - the video was kind of blurry. Use the Force (if you have to)!

I think there is such a thing as professionalism, and it's not always bad. Posting slides for your talks is common practice. In EY's case we can chuck it up to absentminded genius, but this is why we have well organized people like you at SingInst. I say it as a supporter.

extension of Solomonoff induction to anthropic reasoning and higher-order logic – why ideal rational agents still seem to need anthropic assumptions.

I would say it lacks a rationale. AFAIK, intelligent agents just maximise some measure of utility. Anthropic issues are dealt with automatically as part of this process.

Much the same is true of this one:

Theory of logical uncertainty in temporal bounded agents.

Again, this is a sub-problem of solving the maximisation problem.

Breaking a problem down into sub-problems is valuable - of course. On the other hand you don't want to mistake one problem for three problems - or state a simple problem in a complicated way.

How do you construe a utility function from a psychologically realistic detailed model of a human’s decision process?

It may be an obvious thing to say - but there is an existing research area that deals with this problem: revealed preference theory.

I would say obtaining some kind of utility function from observations is rather trivial - the key problem is compressing the results. However, general-purpose compression is part of the whole project of building machine intelligence anyway. If we can't compress, we get nowhere, and if we can compress, then we can (probably) compress utility functions.

Better formalize hybrid of causal and mathematical inference.

I'm not convinced that there is much to be done there. Inductive inference is quite general, while causal inference involves its application to systems that change over time in a lawful manner. Are we talking about optimising inductive inference systems to preferentially deal with causal patterns?

That is similar to the "reference machine" problem - in that eventually you can expose the machine to some real-world data and then let it design its own reference machine. Hand-coding a reference machine might help with getting off the ground initially, however.

Does anyone understand better - or have a link?

Making hypercomputation conceivable

This one seems to be a pretty insignificant problem, IMHO. Real icing-on-the-cake stuff that isn't worth spending time on at this stage.