Roman Yampolskiy: Every Technology Has Both Negative and Positive Effects!

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Roman V. Yampolskiy is an Assistant Professor at the School of Engineering and Director at the Cybersecurity Lab of the University of Louisville. He is also an alumnus of Singularity University (GSP2012) and a visiting fellow of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI). Dr. Yampolskiy is a well known researcher with a more holistic point of view, stressing the perils as much as the promises of exponential technology. Thus I was happy to bring him on Singularity 1 on 1 to try and bring some balance to our views of the future.

During our conversation with Roman we cover a variety of interesting topics such as: our shared experience of growing up behind the Iron Curtain; his personal motivation and main goals; why he disagrees with Marvin Minsky on the progress made in Artificial Intelligence; why he loves the “brute force” approach to AI; the Turing Test and its implications for humanity; Isaac Asimov’s Laws of Robotics; Hugo de Garis and the Artilect War; Samuel Butler and Ted Kaczynski; his upcoming book Artificial Superintelligence: A Futuristic Approach; the chances for a “soft” or “hard” take-off of the technological singularity…

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Who is Roman Yampolskiy?

Roman V. Yampolskiy holds a PhD degree from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University at Buffalo. There he was a recipient of a four year NSF (National Science Foundation) IGERT (Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship) fellowship. Before beginning his doctoral studies Dr. Yampolskiy received a BS/MS (High Honors) combined degree in Computer Science from Rochester Institute of Technology, NY, USA.

After completing his PhD dissertation Dr. Yampolskiy held a position of an Affiliate Academic at the Center for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University of London, College of London. In 2008 Dr. Yampolskiy accepted an assistant professor position at the Speed School of Engineering, University of Louisville, KY. He had previously conducted research at the Laboratory for Applied Computing (currently known as Center for Advancing the Study of Infrastructure) at the Rochester Institute of Technology and at the Center for Unified Biometrics and Sensors at the University at Buffalo. Dr. Yampolskiy is also an alumnus of Singularity University (GSP2012) and a visiting fellow of the Singularity Institute, recently renamed MIRI.

Dr. Yampolskiy’s main areas of interest are behavioral biometrics, digital forensics, pattern recognition, genetic algorithms, neural networks, artificial intelligence and games. Dr. Yampolskiy is an author of over 100 publications including multiple journal articles and books. His research has been cited by numerous scientists and profiled in popular magazines both American and foreign (New Scientist, Poker Magazine, Science World Magazine), dozens of websites (BBC, MSNBC, Yahoo! News) and on radio (German National Radio, Alex Jones Show). Reports about his work have attracted international attention and have been translated into many languages including Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Romanian, and Spanish.