There’s an excellent round-up over at Next Big Future on the Roadmap for Additive Manufacturing. This is solid freeform fabrication, 3-D printing, stereolithography, rapid prototyping, and so forth. In the long run, 3-D printing is one of the more straightforward paths to full-fledged nanotech with mechanosynthesis. Mechanosynthesis might be seen simply as the ultimate in… Continue reading Roadmap for Additive Manufacturing
US General Demands Robot Army, Counts 122 Lives That Bots Could Have Saved | Popular Science. It isn’t really clear from this story whether the “robots” involved or available were autonomous, teleoperated, or some combination. However, this story wraps up my reaction to a lot of techno-angst in a nutshell: Speaking at the Association for… Continue reading US General Counts 122 Lives That Bots Could Have Saved | Popular Science
Superconductor World Record Surpasses 250K. Superconductors.ORG herein reports the observation of record high superconductivity near 254 Kelvin (-19C, -2F). This temperature critical (Tc) is believed accurate +/- 2 degrees, making this the first material to enter a superconductive state at temperatures commonly found in household freezers. In 3 months, it will be colder than that… Continue reading Superconductor World Record Surpasses 250K
Overcoming Bias : Prefer Law To Values. Robin Hanson blogs on what kind of robots we’d want to live with in the future: The later era when robots are vastly more capable than people should be much like the case of choosing a nation in which to retire. In this case we don’t expect to… Continue reading Overcoming Bias : Prefer Law To Values
Less Wrong: I’m Not Saying People Are Stupid. The real question isn’t whether people are stupid. The real question is whether people make decisions that matter a lot incorrectly. I claim that we’ve already, as a society, decided that they do. We’ve replaced kings — human beings — with artificial rule-based decision procedures based on… Continue reading Eliezer doth protest too much, methinks
“Matter and Beyond” is a webcast / local cable program in New Jersey, and they won an Emmy for the episode about future AI and machine ethics. It featured interviews with, among others, your humble narrator: TV PROGRAM EXPLORING SCIENCE, ETHICS & SPIRITUALITY WINS 2009 MID-ATLANTIC EMMY AWARD SOMERSET, NEW JERSEY – Ebru Television Network,… Continue reading "Matter and Beyond" wins an Emmy
YouTube – IBM DNA Transistor. It isn’t really a transistor, it’s a gadget for sequencing DNA through a nanopore. But it’s getting close to the way one expects nanotech to read a molecule, as it it were a magnetic tape or the like. Now if they could only come up with a way to write… Continue reading IBM DNA "Transistor"
There were talks by two of SIAI’s researchers, Eliezer Yudkowsky and Anna Salamon, on the general subject of producing a friendly AI as opposed to whatever the alternative is, presumably the Terminator scenario or the like. Eliezer did his usual thing on cognitive biases in humans, and Anna ended the conference with a very nice… Continue reading Yet More Thoughts on the Singularity Summit
PALO ALTO, Calif., Oct 06, 2009 (BUSINESS WIRE) — The Foresight Institute, a nanotechnology education and public policy think tank based in Palo Alto, has announced the winners of the prestigious 2009 Foresight Institute Feynman Prizes in Nanotechnology. Established in 1993 in honor of Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman, two $5,000 prizes are awarded in… Continue reading Foresight Institute Announces Feynman Prize Winners
The Space Review: The other 40th anniversary. Less than three months after billions of people were transfixed by “one small step” a Princeton physics professor named Gerard K. O’Neill walked into a classroom with less than a dozen undergraduates and asked a seemingly simple question: “Is the surface of a planet really the right place… Continue reading The Space Review: The other 40th anniversary
