Forced Artificial Scarcity: the economy of the future

This humorous essay at Cracked.com by David WongĀ has a lot of truth in it about the change we are now seeing in how the economy functions, as so many goods and services are produced using automation: And if someday we do perfect cold-fusion reactors or nanotech manufacturing and everyone has 100 GB/second Wi-Fi connections downloading… Continue reading Forced Artificial Scarcity: the economy of the future

Humanity+ @ Caltech

Redefining Humanity in the Era of Radical Technological Change, December 4-5, 2010, Pasadena, CA

Don't miss the Open Science Summit, July 29-31, in person or live webcast

TheĀ Open Science Summit on July 29-31 in BerkeleyĀ is looking better and better. Topics include OpenPCR, DIY biology, open source hardware, brain preservation, synthetic biology, gene patents, open data, open access journals, reputation engines, crowd-funding and microfinance for science, citizen science, biohacking, open source biodefense, cure entrepreneurs, open source drug discovery, patent pools, tech transfer, and… Continue reading Don't miss the Open Science Summit, July 29-31, in person or live webcast

What Foresight is about

It’s a good thing we got Nanodot moved onto a new server recently — we just had a huge spike in readers.Ā  This is due to one recent post, Some Historical Perspective, being picked up and spread around the climate-change blogosphere.Ā  Of the pageviews we have had over the past three months, 10% of them… Continue reading What Foresight is about

Dr. Doom has some good news: nanotechnology

From The Atlantic: Nouriel Roubini, the New York University economist who accurately forecast the bursting of the housing bubble and the resulting economic contraction, has become famous for his pessimismā€”he has been the gloomiest of the doomsayers… ā€œThe question is, can the U.S. grow in a non-bubble way?ā€ [Roubini] asked the question rhetorically, so I… Continue reading Dr. Doom has some good news: nanotechnology

Solar cells with nanocrystal ink reach 18 percent efficiency

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, firmĀ 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

ESP

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

Singularity or Bust

It’s a question of some interest whether the Singularity will consist of just more exponential growth, or whether some superexponential growth mode is likely to happen (or is even possible), such as would be required for a real mathematical singularity. On the side of exponential growth, as I pointed out here, is the fact that… Continue reading Singularity or Bust

Flying Cars: how close are we?

Previous in series: VTOL So, how close are we to flying cars? For specificity, let’s pick a technological bar to hurdle that answers most of the objections to the concept we’ve seen as comments on the previous posts: It should be relatively high-powered compared to current light craft. It should be STOVL for safety and… Continue reading Flying Cars: how close are we?

Space travel: utter bilge?

It is, today, just 40 years since I sat glued to a grainy black-and-white TV set and watched the Apollo astronauts land on, and then step out on, the moon. If you had asked me then, I would have assured you that by the year 2000, much less 2009, I’d have my own spaceship, or… Continue reading Space travel: utter bilge?

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