Previous: What Singularity? Yesterday I took issue with Alfred Nordmann’s IEEE post in which he claimed that technological progress was slowing down instead of accelerating. I claimed instead that it was being distorted by the needs of the next rungs of the Maslow hierarchy, and that a huge portion of society’s energy was going into… Continue reading ESP
There’s an interesting piece up at the IEEE robotics blog, by Alfred Nordmann, with the subtitle “The story of the Singularity is sweeping, dramatic, simple–and wrong.” He argues that far from accelerating, technological progress is slowing down: The trouble begins with the singularitarians’ assumption that technological advances have accelerated. I’d argue that I have seen… Continue reading What Singularity?
Here at Foresight our main focus is on longer-term technologies such as molecular manufacturing, but we keep an eye on what’s arriving along the nearer-term pathways as well. In 2007 I attended a workshop on “Nanotechnology for Chemical and Biological Defense” and the proceedings volume of that meeting, with the same name, is now available.… Continue reading Nanotechnology for chemical and biological defense: the book
Nanodot appears to be back on the air again. Our outage was an aftereffect of the hack attack we had a few weeks ago. This, and the other lingering effect (de-listing of the main site from Google) are both not actual results of the hacking (which put code in that popped up ad windows) but… Continue reading Back again
Spammers hacked into Foresight.org recently and inserted junk into some of our pages; we think we’ve gotten rid of it but let us know if you see any more!
WordPress seems to be queueing comments somewhere in the system and I’m not seeing them for moderation till days later sometimes — even my own! Once you have a comment approved, tho, all further comments by you should be posted automatically. (A spam control measure, as you can imagine.) Josh
From The Gulf Times via Nanowerk: The proposal for establishing an Arab Council on Nanotechnology (ACON) was presented by Al-Quds University’s Mukhles Sowwan while discussing about ‘Nanotechnology and molecular manufacturing: Towards balanced plans for responsible worldwide use.’ “The mission of ACON should be to raise awareness of the benefits and dangers of molecular nanotechnology, and… Continue reading Proposal for Arabs to address molecular manufacturing
Over at Accelerating Future, Michael Anissimov continues the discussion about nanofactories. He says a number of reasonable things, but then mischaracterizes, or at least greatly oversimplifies, Foresight’s position on nanofactories and self-replicating machines in general: The general implied position of the Foresight Institute appears to be, “we’ll figure these things out as we go, MNT… Continue reading Replicating nanofactories redux
Over at Accelerating Future, Michael Anissimov has a post about self-replication in which he seems to find it remarkable that Foresight, among others, can view a world containing mechanical replicators with aplomb: What is remarkable are those that seem to argue, like Ray Kurzweil, the Foresight Institute, and the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology, that humanity… Continue reading Self-replicating nanofactories?
Conference to tackle what they claim is “the single most important issue in science & society in this century.”
