I was looking forward to this IAMA, but left feeling disappointed in having learned nothing worth remembering.
In summary: Almost every question directly concern products offered by Udacity. I guess this was my fault, and our fault, for not asking interesting and challenging questions. Some answers did offer shallow advice on succeeding in computer science and education. Almost every answer could have been penned by an intern at Udacity, or any reasonably experienced computer science professional. Udacity's marketing departement is the only winner here. This was a failed opportunity.
Sebastian Thrun's Singularity Summit talk: "Toward Human level Intelligence in Autonomous Cars"
I would like to know what was on the video at 8:13 (the camera pans away). Eliezer seemed to find it pretty funny.
Money quote "I think we should really try again the big goal: create human level intelligence. I think this is totally doable. We now have faster computer than ever before, more data than even 1,000 humans can comprehend during their live times, and much better engineering. If I ever run out of things to do, that's what I'll do."
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/v59z3/iam_sebastian_thrun_stanford_professor_google_x/c51j2d0
Teaches some cars to drive themselves and now thinks he can do anything :)
Ok, I posted one while West Coast is sleeping :)
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/v1bjs/saturday_iama_with_sebastian_thrun_stanford/c50gx62
(funny that the SIAI backlink has Thrun's pic on the front page)
You should repost in the real thread:
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/v59z3/iam_sebastian_thrun_stanford_professor_google_x/
http://udacity.blogspot.com/2012/06/sebastian-thrun-udacity-ceo-will.html
While Sebastian is not an AGI researcher his reputation in the broad AI community is high due to him largely making self-driving cars happen (and those are autonomous AI systems, even if narrow). I think his opinion of AGI might worth asking (he has a high position in Google's X-labs)
He is also interesting from due to a number of innovations he partook in that are likely to be pretty historical