The Edge just released the answers to their annual Question of the Year.  This year the question was “What are you optimistic about?”  A bunch of the answers said they were optimistic about optimism.  And a large number of responses were people saying they were optmistic about our chances of combating/surviving global warming.  But the ones I find the most interesting are the AI and brain related ones, so I’ll highlight a few of my favorites here.

AI pioneer Marvin Minsky says he’s optimistic about our chances of developing immortality.  He suggests that we may be able to download our conciousness to a computer in the near future and thus live on forever in silicon (something I’ve mentioned before).

AI researcher Rodney Brooks is optimistic about space flight in the next century.  He thinks there will be people living on other planets in our lifetime and cites all the private space ventures that are working on their own spaceship designs right now.  He emphasizes how important colonizing other planets is to increasing our species’ long-term chances of survival.

Autism researcher Simon Baron-Cohen has a really interesting piece about the rise of autism and the digital age.  He suggests the rise in the rate of autism in children is not something to be pessimistic about because many of these children will be very successful in the digital age.  Autism is a disease that makes it much more difficult for children to relate to others, but perhaps easier for them to relate to a computer.

Cognitive Scientist Donald Hoffman thinks we will soon have the answer to the mind-body problem.  He thinks most of the current theories are wrong, but because of our presuppositions about the brain and this problem. He foresees a shift in these presuppositions and a breakthrough in this area coming soon.

Computational Neuroscientist Terrence Sejnowski thinks there will be a breakthrough in understanding intelligence.  He thinks reinforcement learning may lead to this breakthrough as recent research suggests that dopamine in the brain may act as the reward signal in reinforcement learning.

Gloria Origgi talks about the impact of multi-linguism in Europe. Something I mentioned in my posts after reading Consciousness Explained was the effect that language has on our thinking and how it made me want to learn another language.  In Europe (and in most of the world other than the US), children are learning multiple languages all the time.  Origgis suggests this may lead to more cognitive flexibility in the children along with less intolerance in Europe.

Psychologist Sherry Turkle has some interesting thoughts on the objects that inspire young children to become scientists.  A girl braiding her doll’s hair again and again (recursion), taking apart toys and things.

Finally, artificial life researcher Steve Grand is optimistic about the strong possibility that we’ve got everything horribly wrong.  In many cases in the past, we have had things horribly wrong and then suddenly realize that all our assumptions are wrong (like believing the Earth is the center of the universe).  He suggests that two possibilities would be quantum theory and the theory of matter.  But then goes on to say that AI may be another likely one and that neuroscience has the answer (very similar to Donald Hoffman’s piece on solving the mind-body problem by fixing our presuppositions).

Here is a great video of a talk given by Richard Dawkins at Randolph-Macon Women’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia.  Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University is in the same town and its students showed up with all sorts of entertaining questions, making for an lively Q&A session.  Here’s the link for the video.

Here is another good link, a short Wired interview with Marvin Minksy and Daniel Dennett on the mind and emotions.

There’s an interesting article in today’s New York Times on free will.  It seems that the scientific evidence is starting to build up showing that we don’t really consciously make our decisions, more likely they are made by the brain in the subconcsious somewhere and then our consiousness is informed of it.  This has led to a debate over what free will is and whether we have it.  In my earlier post I said that although our decisions may be made by deterministic processes and the brain and could be predicted if we understood it, since it is our brain making those decisions, isn’t that still free will?  In the article there are some interesting mathematical discussions of Godel’s theorem and how even if our decisions are made through a deterministic process in the brain, it may remain too complex for us to ever predict what decisions we’ll make.