One way to reach molecular machine systems is to get really, really good at protein engineering. If that’s your goal, you’ll want to be in Boston on May 17-21 for PEGS 2010, “the essential protein engineering summit”. Not sure if this is your pathway? Just reading the talk titles is educational. And they have great… Continue reading The protein engineering path to molecular manufacturing
In case anyone wonders where I’ve gone, I’m resigning from Foresight for medical reasons (adhesive capsulitis — long and painful course of therapy) and to concentrate my few remaining neurons on my AI research. I really wish nanomedicine had advanced further in the interim 🙂
Wondering how U.S. federal nanotech tax dollars are spent? Obama’s first President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) review will be webcast live tomorrow, March 12. This review only occurs every two years so this is your big chance to see what the current administration thinks of the NNI. Thirty minutes are set… Continue reading Live webcast tomorrow March 12 on U.S. Nat'l Nanotech Initiative
I’m on my way to AGI-10, the general AI conference, in Lugano. If any readers are attending, let’s get together. Among other things, we’ll be unveiling a preliminary take on the AGI Roadmap (of which Foresight is a sponsor).
The UK-based Institute of Physics (IOP) publishes, among other things, the journal Nanotechnology, one of the leading journals in the field, and has had special issues with papers from Foresight conferences gaoing back to the 90s. It was thus somewhat surprising, yet gratifying, to find them submitting quite a strongly-worded critique of practices in climatology… Continue reading IOP comments on Climategate
It’s been snowing continuously here for about 2 days. The heaviest snows I’ve experienced in my life (for any significant amount of time) were an inch an hour, but this has been half that — amounting to a foot a day. If it were to keep snowing like this for a week, it would be… Continue reading Snow thoughts
Robin Hanson comments on David Brin’s response to a New Scientist editorial. As Brin notes, many would-be broadcasters come from an academic area where for decades the standard assumption has been that aliens are peaceful zero-population-growth no-nuke greens, since we all know that any other sort quickly destroy themselves. This seems to me an instructive… Continue reading Alien Invasion
Let’s try to pull all the threads together, as futurists — which is the whole point here — and get some idea about when it might be reasonable to expect AI to show up. When I say AI I want to look at the entire diahuman range, so the answer would still be a range… Continue reading AI: Summing up
Rob Freitas has a new paper up: Robert A. Freitas Jr., “Diamond Trees (Tropostats): A Molecular Manufacturing Based System for Compositional Atmospheric Homeostasis,” IMM Report 43, 10 February 2010 Abstract. The future technology of molecular manufacturing will enable long-term sequestration of atmospheric carbon in solid diamond products, along with sequestration of lesser masses of numerous… Continue reading New Freitas paper: Diamond Trees
Why we should suspect that the brain has a limited ability to recurse, but prefers to daisy-chain instead: The house the malt the rat the cat the dog the cow with the crumpled horn the maiden all forlorn the man all tattered and torn the priest all shaven and shorn the cock that crowed in… Continue reading Stackless brain
