From Physorg: “This body of work illustrates that carbon nanotube transistor technology has moved beyond the realm of scientific discovery and into engineering research,” said H.-S. Philip Wong, a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford and a co-author of the paper. “We are now able to construct devices and build circuits on a wafer scale… Continue reading Nanocircuitry
It’s a good thing we got Nanodot moved onto a new server recently — we just had a huge spike in readers. This is due to one recent post, Some Historical Perspective, being picked up and spread around the climate-change blogosphere. Of the pageviews we have had over the past three months, 10% of them… Continue reading What Foresight is about
H+ magazine is available online: my article, Singularity: nanotech or AI, is on page 82. enjoy!
Michael A. writes: I support the consensus science on intelligence for the sake of promoting truth, but I also must admit that it especially concerns me that the modern denial of the reality of different intelligence levels will cause ethicists and the public to ignore the risks from human-equivalent artificial intelligence. After all, if all… Continue reading Intelligence and the Chinese Room
One of the fastest-growing general areas of technology, of which robotics is just a part, is the ability to control things using increasingly sophisticated theory and algorithms, and the ability to run non-trivial simulation models as part of the control process. Consider this use of compressed air jets: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkhMCCOHFmM From the report at IEEE… Continue reading Air jet manipulation
Metamaterials could reduce friction in nanomachines. from Eurekalert: Ames Laboratory researchers discover repulsive Casimir effect Nanoscale machines expected to have wide application in industry, energy, medicine and other fields may someday operate far more efficiently thanks to important theoretical discoveries concerning the manipulation of famous Casimir forces that took place at the U.S. Department of… Continue reading Metamaterials could reduce friction in nanomachines
Dexter Johnson writes, “What Should We Call the (Nano)technology in Your Stain-resistant Pants?” … the competition for ownership of the term “nanotechnology” that seems to persist between the adherents to MNT, as exemplified by the Foresight Institute, and those who use the term to acknowledge developments in manipulating and exploiting structures that have at least… Continue reading Nanopants, redux
When I woke up this morning, it was nine degrees below zero, Celsius. It’s solidly overcast here, and what’s more, this time of year the sun doesn’t get much more than 20 degrees above the horizon — in the middle of an all-too-short day. My house has a footprint of about 200 square meters. At… Continue reading A Night in the Sun
At Bryan Caplan’s blog this morning there was an odd comment that stirred up a 40-year old memory: A single sentence in the Durants’ The Age of Napoleon makes me wonder whether I can trust a word they write on economic policy: The memory is that it was reading another part of the Durant’s Story… Continue reading Some Historical Perspective
Futurists make lots of predictions, and usually by the time they can be tested they’ve been long forgotten. That’s great when we get them wrong (which is a lot more often than we’d like!) but I take pleasure in claiming I got one right. In this post I wrote: So what’s the next paradigm shift?… Continue reading Prediction
