Potential leap forward in electron microscopy. from Eurekalert. Why it matters: A non-invasive electron microscope could shed light on fundamental questions about life and matter, allowing researchers to observe molecules inside a living cell without disturbing them. If successful, such microscopes would surmount what Nobel laureate Dennis Gabor concluded in 1956 was the fundamental limitation… Continue reading Potential leap forward in electron microscopy
Secrets of the Cell – Self-Destructive Behavior in Cells May Hold Key to a Longer Life – Series – NYTimes.com. Lysosomes are versatile garbage disposals. In addition to taking in shrouded material, they can also pull in individual proteins through special portals on their surface. Lysosomes can even extend a mouthlike projection from their membrane… Continue reading Secrets of the Cell – Self-Destructive Behavior in Cells May Hold Key to a Longer Life – Series – NYTimes.com
Several of the talks at the Summit might be lumped together under the heading “AI — when and how?” The two main pathways were the synthetic approach, talked about by people like Juergen Schmidhuber, Ben Goertzel and Itamar Arel, and brain emulation, talked about by such people as Anders Sandberg, David Chalmers, and Ray Kurzweil.… Continue reading More Thoughts on the Singularity Summit
Thoughts on the Singularity Summit Congratulations to the people of the SIAI for putting on an interesting, stimulating, really well-run conference. Note for those who weren’t able to be there, that the talks were recorded and will be available on SIAI’s website singinst.org. The following comments are not an attempt to explain the talks but… Continue reading Thoughts on the Singularity Summit
The Singularity Summit is going on in NYC this weekend. This will be an open thread for comments or questions about the talks (or any related subject.)
20 Years of Moving Atoms, One by One | Gadget Lab | Wired.com. It’s the 20th anniversary of the famous Eigler “IBM”.
Back in my Moral Railroads post I opined: Unless I am completely mistaken and deluded, there was and is nobodyassociated with the DC train system who wanted the crash to happen. It’s not a question of morality at the level of bad intentions, either of people or machines. It was, in simple terms, a case of… Continue reading Moral Railroads again
There are those who worry about AIs or robots taking over the world. Isaac Asimov famously worried about people worrying about it — what he called the Frankenstein Complex — and invented the Three Laws of Robotics to show, at a sort of literary level of understanding, that we could build machines that were safe… Continue reading Building Safe AI
With the Singularity Summit fast approaching, it’s worth spend a little time pondering the perennial question of nanotechnology vs AI: which will happen first, will they be independent, symbiotic, or synergetic, and so forth? I say perennial because this is a question that has been discussed at Foresight meetings ever since the first Conference 20… Continue reading Nanotech and AI
Josh Hall, on his way to catch a plane, sends us this news from Technology Review’s Katherine Bourzac: A California company is using silicon ink patterned on top of silicon wafers to boost the efficiency of solar cells. The Sunnyvale, CA, firm Innovalight says that the inkjet process is a cheaper route to more-efficient solar power.… Continue reading Solar cells with nanocrystal ink reach 18 percent efficiency
