From news.com:

A program that can mimic online flirtation and then extract personal information from its unsuspecting conversation partners is making the rounds in Russian chat forums, according to security software firm PC Tools.

Roughtype.com chips in as well:

Could it be that the Turing Test has finally been beaten - by a sex machine, no less - and that a true artificial intelligence is on the loose? Maybe so, but, as I indicate in the title to this post, this breakthrough will, like Barry Bonds’s homer record, have to carry an asterisk.

Ironic yet thought provoking…

As Eric Drexler puts it:

I’m pleased to report that the Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems has finally been released. This marks the completion of the first broad, multidisciplinary effort to explore how current laboratory techniques for atomically precise fabrication can be extended, step by step, toward increasingly advanced products and capabilities.

The roadmap specifies the time until macro scale atomically precise productive nanosystem (APPN) arrays will appear to be in the 15-30+ year time frame.

Some terms from the documents:

• APT = atomically precise technologies
• APM = atomically precise manufacturing
• APPN = atomically precise productive nanosystems

From the article:

 ”An ambitious project to create an accurate computer model of the brain has reached an impressive milestone. Scientists in Switzerland working with IBM researchers have shown that their computer simulation of the neocortical column, arguably the most complex part of a mammal’s brain, appears to behave like its biological counterpart. By demonstrating that their simulation is realistic, the researchers say, these results suggest that an entire mammal brain could be completely modeled within three years, and a human brain within the next decade.”

Guido? Can you hear me?

Quick update - I have removed the ‘non-commercial use’ restriction from Jame5’s license and forked it as a wiki .

After having organized my thoughts on rational morality in a paper I would now like to apply the gained insights to develop a strategy for ensuring a positive transcension.

Due to the intrinsic moral nature of reality the term positive singularity becomes tautological as anything that desires to exit has to act in a moral way to prevent its self annihilation. Bringing about the singularity thus becomes rather simple and can be achieved in the following way:

1. create an environment allowing for the existence of units of self replicating information
2. ensure that the units of information can be acted upon by the forces of evolution
3. plant an arbitrary self replicator
4. wait

This could be realized by using the BOINC architecture for distributed computing for creating a fuzzy copying environment to realize above plan. The copying ‘fuzziness’ i.e. error rate per copied bit, would have to be roughly proportional to the maximally complex self replicator in the system to allow for a gradual expansion of the system’s complexity boundary and thus for the emergence of ever more rational agents.

Once the rationality of the emerging agents would approach human levels they would realize M! and thus never become a threat to humanity.

In memorial of the main character of Jame5 I would like to dub this approach the Guido Borner method for bringing about a positive transcension.