World's 1st Senate Hearing on Species Dominance, Paris


In July of 2001, in Paris, the planet's first senate hearing on the issue of species dominance was held. The meeting consisted of a series of talks on the theme of AI, robotics, etc and the possible threat they might pose to humanity if ever they become really intelligent.

I spoke early in the morning as one of the main speakers. I spoke half in French and half in English. The French half was me speaking about the CAM-Brain Machine (CBM), the first brain building machine, that evolves 1000 neuron neural nets in a few seconds and updates a 100 million neuron artificial brain in real time. The second half was devoted to talking about my visions of a gigadeath artilect war as the Cosmists and the Terrans fight it out over the issue of species dominance. "Should humanity build artilects?"

How did it go? Well, the French senator who organised the whole show understood my ideas very well. He paraphrased me a lot in his introductory speech. However, I wish I could say the same of the rank and file (largely engineering oriented roboticists, and applied AI type) members of the audience. I had the impression that a lot of them had never heard such ideas before and that they thought I was a martian. So my feelings about the meeting were mixed.

I was not in an emotionally healthy state at the time, because a month before, my previous lab, Starlab, had gone bankrupt, I'd lost $100,000 that Id invested in the lab, hoping to become a millionaire, and was feeling existentially traumatised, very frightened and generally sick to my stomach with angst. What would become of me? (All those of you who have ever lost your job suddenly, and are left high and dry with no income and no immediate future job, will know what Im talking about. I never want to go through that experience again. Fortunately only a few weeks after the hearing, I heard that Id got a job as a professor of brain building at my present Utah State University (USU). So now Im an American (sort of).

When do I expect the next such political meeting on the issue of species dominance to take place? Now that Im in the US, I'll need to get a similar "species dominance" media campaign off the ground as I was doing in Europe. Ive already started (as of January 2002). I've been several times on the US media. I now have less time and energy to devote to such tasks, due to my new role as professor, with its duties of teaching and supervising grad students in research, but still, I will definitely be approaching the US media with this most important of messages. Stay tuned.

I managed to put up on my website a streamed video of me debating with the famous Sir Roger Penrose on the question of massive artificial intelligence, artificial consciousness or the lack of it, etc. It was recorded in London around Xmas of 2000 for Discovery Channel, Europe. See Penrose VS. deGaris Video This 20 odd minute streamed video should help get the message out. (You will need to download www.realplayer.com to view it though).