A few new futurism resources have come to our attention recently: The Millennium Project Futures Research Methodology Version 3.0, a “handbook on methods and tools to explore future possibilities.” The contents include methodologies such as statistical modeling, technology sequence analysis, etc. Detailed Roadmap of the 21st Century, a list of predictions for the twenty-first century,… Continue reading Futurism resources
A paper on arXiv referenced (and nicely explained) in a Technology Review blog: How altruistic behaviour emerges has puzzled evolutionary biologists for decades. From the point of view of survivial of the fittest, the unselfish concern for the welfare of others seems inexplicable. Surely any organism should always act selfishly if it were truly intent… Continue reading Evolving altruism
A recent Newsweek article on Kurzweil seems to have been something of a hack job, judging from this reply: … For example, of the many accurate predictions for the year 2009 that I wrote in my book The Age of Spiritual Machines, written in the late 1990s, only three are listed in the sidebar “Kurzweil’s… Continue reading Kurzweil responds to Newsweek
The greatly anticipated “AI” project recently unveiled, Wolfram Alpha, appears to have flopped, at least insofar as being an AI. Next up looks to be Siri, an app coming to your iPhone this fall. From the San Jose Mercury: Siri, a San Jose company, announced Wednesday that it would offer an “intelligent agent” for Apple’s… Continue reading Steps to AI?
Nanotechnology is, ultimately, a mechanization of the molecular processes of life. One of the most important of those processes is photosynthesis. If we really understood photosynthesis as deeply as we do, say, gear trains, and had the machinery to build whatever molecular machines we designed, we could build trees that produced gasoline from sunlight and… Continue reading Quantum entanglement in photosynthesis?
EurekAlert reports work by the University of Liverpool and Chinese Academy of Sciences: New rotors could help develop nanoscale generators In collaboration with the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, scientists have investigated the rotation of molecules on a fixed surface to understand how they may help in the development of future rotor-based machinery at… Continue reading UK/China team aim at molecular rotors to generate current
What kind of software will AIs run? This is of some interest, because it will tell us how much the current flowering of parallel hardware will actually get us toward human equivalent processing power. Amdahl’s Law holds: If the task of being intelligent is strongly serial, all those processors won’t help much. If it’s parallelizable,… Continue reading HEPP: serial or parallel?
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
from Nanowerk News: Held at a former air force base in Victorville, Calif. in late 2007, the DARPA Urban Challenge offered a $3.5 million purse to competitors who could design the fastest and safest vehicles that could traverse a 60-mile urban course in moving traffic in less than six hours. The contestant vehicles were unmanned… Continue reading GM engineer: Self-driving cars in next decade
In Beyond AI, my book about the future of artificial intelligence and machine ethics, I made a prediction about how much processing power would be needed for an AI and how long it would take to get it assuming Moore’s Law: You really can’t blame the early AI researchers for their optimism. It must have… Continue reading HEPP: Human Equivalent Processing Power
