The new acronym for the Singularity Institute is MIRI.
The first google hit is the wikipedia page for the Star Trek: TOS episode Miri (S1E8). It's about how 90% of the population of not-Earth was destroyed by an existential threat leaving nothing but irrational children. The crew find themselves under a death sentence from this threat and try to find a solution, but they need the children's help. However the children think themselves immune and immortal and won't assist. In the last seconds, the crew manages to convince the children that the existential threat cannot be ignored and must be solved or the kids will eventually die too. With their help, the crew saves the day and everyone lives happily ever after. Also, the episode was so ahead of it's time that even though it was reviewed as excellent, it got so many complaints that it was never rebroadcast for 20 years.
I think my symbolism detector just pegged off the charts then exploded.
When I searched the first hit was the Malaysian town called Miri. Looks like an example of filter bubbles.
This is an interesting example of how the changing definitions doesn't change reality. 'Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence' sounded all future-y to me, and 'Machine Intelligence Research Institute' sounds all technical and intelligent (silly stereotypes), but in reality they've not changed. Still the same people, doing the same things.
Gonna have to change the site name, though...
And "Machine Intelligence Research Institute" is appropriately descriptive while still being general enough.
MIRI. Machine Intelligence Research Institute.
Adequate. Not especially inspiring but I can't think of anything better either. It is certainly better than "Singularity Institute". (Good change!)
"Machine Intelligence" is my preferred term. "Singularity" seems like pseudoscientific terminology to me.
it's better to have a name that doesn't give a new person all kinds of weird initial associations as their first impression.
Yeah, though I buy into much of what Kurzweil has to say, Singularity has always rubbed me the wrong way - too much of Omega Immanentizing the Eschaton for me.
Is there any other snappy term out there for the idea that we're headed for very big changes through exponential performance improvement in lots of technologies?
Good.
The name "Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence" seemed clunky to me from the moment I encountered it.
Too long. Two parts that don't work together, a first part with social acceptability issues, and a second part which has been taboo in leading tech circles since 1992.
It took me about half a year before I stopped typing siai.org when looking for the Institute's site.
Not to mention that SU took over the mindspace, and that SI occasionally strayed from the area implied by its name.
So, good job! I like it.
I notice that http://www.miri.org is very definitely not a placeholder for a new Singularity Institute page. Have you managed to acquire it?
(miri.com seems as though it should be available, but not exactly entirely appropriate. Maybe better than nothing).
The reason he does not like the term is that, as pointed out before, "emergence" is not an explanation of anything. However, it is an observational phenomenon: when you get a lot of simple things together, they combine in ways one could not foresee and the resulting entities behave by the rules not constructable from (but reducible to) those of the simple constituents. When you combine a lot of simple molecules, you get a solid, a liquid or a gas with the properties you generally cannot infer without observing them first. When you get a group of people together, they start interacting in apriori unpredictable ways as they form a group. Once you observe the group behavior, you can often reduce it to that of its constituents, but a useful description is generally not in terms of the constituents, but in terms of the collective. For example, in thermodynamics people use gas laws and other macroscopic laws instead of the Newton's laws.
I am guessing that one reason that the (friendly) machine intelligence problem is so hard is that intelligence is an emergent property: once you understand it, you can reduce it to interactions between neurons, but you cannot infer it from suc...
http://singularity.org/blog/2013/01/30/we-are-now-the-machine-intelligence-research-institute-miri/
As Risto Saarelma pointed out on IRC, "Volcano Lair Doom Institute" would have been cooler, but this is pretty good too. As the word "Singularity" has pretty much lost its meaning, it's better to have a name that doesn't give a new person all kinds of weird initial associations as their first impression. And "Machine Intelligence Research Institute" is appropriately descriptive while still being general enough.