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Gaming the Future: The Book!

Month: February 2010

IOP comments on Climategate

The UK-based Institute of Physics (IOP) publishes, among other things, the journal Nanotechnology, one of the leading journals in the field, and has had special issues with papers from Foresight conferences gaoing back to the 90s. It was thus somewhat surprising, yet gratifying, to find them submitting quite a strongly-worded critique of practices in climatology… Continue reading IOP comments on Climategate

Snow thoughts

It’s been snowing continuously here for about 2 days.  The heaviest snows I’ve experienced in my life (for any significant amount of time) were an inch an hour, but this has been half that — amounting to a foot a day. If it were to keep snowing like this for a week, it would be… Continue reading Snow thoughts

Alien Invasion

Robin Hanson comments on David Brin’s response to a New Scientist editorial. As Brin notes, many would-be broadcasters come from an academic area where for decades the standard assumption has been that aliens are peaceful zero-population-growth no-nuke greens, since we all know that any other sort quickly destroy themselves.  This seems to me an instructive… Continue reading Alien Invasion

AI: Summing up

Let’s try to pull all the threads together, as futurists — which is the whole point here — and get some idea about when it might be reasonable to expect AI to show up.  When I say AI I want to look at the entire diahuman range, so the answer would still be a range… Continue reading AI: Summing up

New Freitas paper: Diamond Trees

Rob Freitas has a new paper up: Robert A. Freitas Jr., “Diamond Trees (Tropostats):  A Molecular Manufacturing Based System for Compositional Atmospheric Homeostasis,” IMM Report 43, 10 February 2010 Abstract. The future technology of molecular manufacturing will enable long-term sequestration of atmospheric carbon in solid diamond products, along with sequestration of lesser masses of numerous… Continue reading New Freitas paper: Diamond Trees

Stackless brain

Why we should suspect that the brain has a limited ability to recurse, but prefers to daisy-chain instead: The house the malt the rat the cat the dog the cow with the crumpled horn the maiden all forlorn the man all tattered and torn the priest all shaven and shorn the cock that crowed in… Continue reading Stackless brain

Ethics for machines

… to boldly go where no man has gone before! This final phrase of the classic Star Trek opening spiel had two problems with it, one as seen by people after the fact, and the other as seen by those who had gone before. As seen by earlier generations, the phrase “to boldly go” is… Continue reading Ethics for machines

Merkle wins Hamming Medal with Diffie, Hellman

Foresight Institute Feynman Prize winner Dr. Ralph Merkle, perhaps better known to Nanodot readers for his nanotech work, has just won the IEEE’s Hamming Medal along with Martin Hellman and Whitfield Diffie: Thirty-five years ago, Martin Hellman, Whitfield Diffie and Ralph Merkle developed an easy method for sending secure messages over insecure channels. With the… Continue reading Merkle wins Hamming Medal with Diffie, Hellman

NLP: State of the Art

Over the past ten to fifteen years, research in computational linguistics has undergone a dramatic “paradigm shift.” Statistical learning methods that automatically acquire knowledge for language processing from empirical data have largely supplanted systems based on human knowledge engineering. The original success of statistical methods in speech recognition has been particularly influential in motivating the… Continue reading NLP: State of the Art

Nano Valentine!

It’s pure palladium, 8 nm wide, made at the University of Birmingham’s Nanoscale Physics Research Laboratory. h/t Nanowerk

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