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Gaming the Future: The Book!

Month: July 2000

2020 Visions: The Next Twenty Years conference 2000

from the the-future-arrives-too-soon-and-in-the-wrong-order dept.
WIRED reports on the 2000 installment of the Next Twenty Years discussion series. The SF participants included Paul Saffo (of the Institute for the Future), Stanley Williams (HP Labs), and Bill Gurley (Benchmark Capital), who all gave their views of general societal trends, and also reported their predictions for specific goodies to be on hand by 2020: home electric fuel cells that will enable you to go live off the grid anywhere; gigabyte email attachments; and "browsable desktop economies".

Time Magazine: nanotech benefits potentially enormous

from the Time-for-nanotech-time dept.
Senior Associate RalphMerkle reports an item on molecular nanotech not available on the web:"The June 19th 2000 issue of Time Magazine, "The Future of Technology," has a two-page article titled "Will tiny robots build diamonds one atom at a time?" by Michael D. Lemonick on page 94:"On its face, the notion seems utterly preposterous: a single technology so incredibly versatile that it can fight disease, stave off aging, clean up toxic waste, boost the world's food supply and build roads, automobiles and skyscrapers — and that's only to start with…Crazy though it sounds, the idea of nanotechnology is very much in the scientific mainstream, with research labs all over the world trying to make it work."Read More for additional quotes from this well-done article. Merkle comments: Acceptance of the core concepts of molecular nanotechnology is proceeding at an accelerating rate.

*You* can nominate the Feynman Prize winner

from the rewards-for-good-workers dept.
The deadline for Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology submissions is July 31, 2000, but now is the time to get your nomination in.

If you suspect your nominees may be too busy — or modest — to complete the process, you can do the whole thing for them; it's pretty easy.

Russian Patent issued on Bottle

from the don't-laugh-it-happens-here-too dept.
The Moscow Times reports: Intellect, a company specializing in legal advice on industrial property rights, secured the patents from state patent agency Rospatent and has sent letters to breweries offering a license so brewers can continue to use bottles and cans…Intellect general director Vladimir Zaichenko said the company was set up 1 1/2 years ago and has received hundreds of patents — on screws, ball bearings, flasks, cisterns, ampules, railroad lines and other everyday items.

Freeman Dyson on New Species of Humans

from the my-new-wings-don't-work-in-Earth-gravity-anyway dept.
Ralph Brave reports in Salon: Princeton's Dyson has his own ideas on what is to be done. In his view, the speciation of humans into different groups is inevitable — and it would be a disaster to allow such diversification without restraint. "We must travel the high road into space, to find new worlds to match our new (genetic) capabilities," Dyson writes in The Sun, the Genome and the Internet, published last year. "To give us room to explore the varieties of mind and body which our genome can evolve, one planet is not enough." CP: What is the "restraint" here — getting to colonize space? Oh, OK…since they insist.

Yudkowsky's Scale of Future Shock Levels

from the weirdness-comes-in-degrees dept.
How much change can you handle? Find out by seeing where you fit on Senior Associate Eliezer S. Yudkowsky's Shock Level scale showing various levels of coming technologies and potential applications. Which level can you face with "calm acceptance"? You've probably picked your level correctly when lower levels seem boring while higher ones look flaky. This scale, or one very like it, is a key tool of memetic engineering. Read More for caveats.

Self-assembled artificial bacterium?

from the higher-order-self-assembly dept.
BrianWang and GinaMiller both reported this U of Illinois news release: "By manipulating simple and nonspecific interactions, researchers have discovered a way to make chemicals spontaneously self-assemble into ribbon-like tubules that resemble bacterial cell walls. The micrometer-sized tubules have potential applications in drug delivery systems and as templates for the synthesis of inorganic nanostructured materials." The Science article (abstract and summary free with registration) about this work concludes "The tubules described here…can be thought of as constituting a spontaneously assembled 'artificial' bacterium." CP: An overstatement, but the reseachers get points for vision.

Quantum-dot Cellular Automata = Molecular Electronics

from the really-different-computers dept.
Senior Associate Alison Chaiken (alison) writes "In a recent Science magazine article, Notre Dame electrical engineer Craig S. Lent discusses the possibility of molecular electronics circuits based on the "Quantum-dot Cellular Automata (QCA)" paradigm. (This article, as well as a critical response, should be available with free registration.) The primary thrust of the article is to argue that attempts to implement current-switching molecular electronics that mirror the behavior of silicon circuits are misguided, and that molecular electronics will require a different type of architecture altogether." Read More for additional analysis.

Nature Releases Genome Information

from the it's-a-discovery-not-an-invention-so-no-patents! dept.
Foresight Director of Communications Tanya Jones alerts us that the journal "Nature is openly publishing information on the Human Genome project on its website, rather than restricting this to subscribers only. See their index of relevant papers, news, and application data. Included is asection on bioethics which may shed some light on concerns about the development of nanotechnology and provide us with avenues to achieving consensus on how these technologies may safely be developed. –Tanya "

Distributed Biomorphic Bots for Space

from the let's-let-them-do-the-work dept.
Gordon Worley writes "There is a n article up at SPACE.COM about robots being built to explore Mars. The one described in the article is distributed and reminds me very much of the work done by Mark Tilden [of Los Alamos], though not enough details are given to decide how closely. " Read More for details on BiRoD — Biomorphic Robot with Distributed power.

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