Both Jaron Lanier and Eliezer Yudkowsky have been Future Salon speakers. Eliezer focusing on creating a general artificial intelligence, Jaron working for years on similar problems, but rejecting the as he calls it the religious aspects of the AI field.
Just last week someone asked me for the transcript of Jaron Lanier ramps up the McLuhan Ramp Future Salon. Worth checking out.
After Eliezer's Hard AI Future Salon, which is equally interesting, he told me he would love to debate Jaron again. I think it is, because there aren't many people that have thought about AI so deeply and came to a different conclusion than him. Jaron on the other hand looks at the beginning like thinking: "Oh, why did I agree to this?" ;-) It may be that I don't know him enough and that is just in general how he comes across.
If there wasn't the word brainiac already you would have to invent it for these two.
Interesting feature of the bloggingheads.tv player is a 1.4x button to speed up debates, but in this case I would like to have a 0.8x, so my brain can catch up ;-) Actually I would like to have a jump 30 seconds back, as in did I understand this right? Let me hear it again.
This one stuck: Jaron: Consciousness is not a phenomenon it is in a class of itself. Here is that part of the debate: The point of trying to explain consciousness (07:00)
Eliezer a couple of times referred to Daniel Denett. Thought I add a link to him too.